Like all proper banana republics, the Olive Republic of Greece has jailed some elected members of parliament, charging them with criminality, as obscure and vague an accusation as hooliganism used to be when Uncle Joe Stalin was displeased with some Russian writer. Stalin used dissidents for target practice; the present gang in power in the...
Category: Columns
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Of Locks and la King
A man whose reputation rivals that of the Clintons for dishonesty and lies recently claimed he overheard a gangster confirming that Bobby Riggs had thrown his match against Billie Jean King in the infamous Battle of the Sexes on September 20, 1973. King won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. According to the Clinton-wannabe, Bobby was $100,000 in...
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The Academic Industrial Complex
In his farewell address, Dwight Eisenhower warned against a military-industrial complex that would seek to enrich itself through false appeals to the common good. Today, it is higher education that is growing rich by convincing the public that its actions are for their good. The costs that universities and colleges are charging students range from...
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Answering Islam
Americans find it difficult to understand the Islamic threat. It is not just that they have made the mistake of listening to presidential speeches on the “religion of peace” or dulled their wits reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The fault does not lie exclusively or even primarily with American schools,...
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The Middle East: Steady as She Goes
To paraphrase Camus, he who despairs of the condition of the Middle East is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool. In a permanent disaster zone, the best one can hope for is that things will not get worse—not too soon, anyway. Things did get better in the Middle East...
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Attachment and Loss
Blue Jasmine Produced by Perdido Productions Written and directed by Woody Allen Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Grim. That’s the first thing to say about Woody Allen’s new movie, Blue Jasmine. The second is that its lead, Cate Blanchett, gives one of the best performances by an actress since Vivian Leigh played Blanche DuBois...
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Friending Narcissus
Cicero was a wise human being who wrote that a man with a garden and a library has all he needs. He also said that only a man without a brain tweets. (Well, he would have said it, were he around today.) The Oxford philosopher John Gray, a man I used to get drunk with...
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A Different Hollywood
We’ve all heard it dozens of times after another disappointed moviegoer leaves the theater: “They don’t make ’em like they used to.” One reason is the absence today of the kind of men who once made the movies. Try this test yourself: Think of a few of your favorite movies, and then identify the directors,...
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An Aix to Grind
As though in memory of those antediluvian Playboy “pictorials” in which the hapless young lady posed with whatever attribute of her metier the photographer had unearthed in the props room—an alleged student of architecture with a carpenter’s wooden compass, a presumed graduate of the police academy with a sheriff’s badge, a putative nurse with a...
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The Stafford Disaster
If you didn’t hear about the social and medical catastrophe that occurred at Stafford Hospital, in the English Midlands—a disaster that claimed some 1,200 lives—then you must have been following the U.S. news media. The Stafford experience should be a nightmarish wake-up call for Americans, and a crushingly definitive argument in the nation’s debate over...
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Terminators, Inc.
“Hieronymo’s mad againe.” The cover of the August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, titled “Drone Warrior,” features a picture of President Obama and the question, “Has It Become Too Easy for a President to Kill?” I should have thought “Stop me before I kill again” or, perhaps, “I’ll be back” would...
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A Failure of Intelligence
“Al Qaeda is on the run, Osama bin Laden is dead,” President Obama announced at a rally in Des Moines on the eve of last year’s presidential election. Less than a year later it is evident that, contrary to Obama’s assurances, Al Qaeda is alive and well, along with other Islamic terrorist networks. The jihadists...
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Elysian Fields Forever
Elysium Produced and distributed by TriStar Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment Directed and written by Neill Blomkamp Neill Blomkamp’s second film, Elysium, is, in a way, a sequel to his first, District 9. This time, however, there are no eight-foot-tall prawn-like aliens accusing earthlings in Johannesburg, South Africa, of the crime of apartheid or insensitivity...
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Democracy Is Overrated
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...
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The Best Schooling Money Can Buy
Well, the jury, they see their facts. My thoughts of the jury, they old, that’s old-school people. We in a new school, our generation, my generation. Poor Rachel Jeantel has been ridiculed for her diction, elocution, and irrationality, but in her interview with Piers Morgan she makes a valid point in contrasting “old-school people” who...
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A Tale of Two Islamists
Two waves of popular protests against Islamist regimes, one in Turkey and the other in Egypt, have produced notably different outcomes. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has weathered the storm, while President Mohamed Morsi was removed from office by the military. In view of the similarities between Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) and Morsi’s...
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Reason’s Enemy
Copperhead Produced by Swordspoint Productions Directed by Ronald F. Maxwell Screenplay by Bill Kauffman Distributed by Brainstorm Media What makes a good war story? Cannons, bombs, bloody bodies, and bounding heroes? Stephen Crane’s short story “An Episode of War” demonstrates it can be achieved by other means. It fully registers the madness, horror, and folly...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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 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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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...