Category: Columns

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....

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...

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...

Presidential elections in the United States sometimes seem more like the Wars of the Roses than political contests.  The resemblance to dynastic conflict goes beyond the predictable acrimony between two sets of political interests: the taxpayers of the Republican Party and the tax consumers on whom the Democrats rely.  It is true, of course, that...

The Jerk virtually defines the American character of the 21st century.  Ask any foreigner, and he will tell you amazing tales of badly dressed, obnoxious Americans who treat restaurant owners as their personal servants, snap their fingers, screaming Garçon! Garçon! for service, and complain about everything they eat.  Too many American travelers have seen too...

Some insomniacs do endless sequences  of sums in their heads, while more traditional conservatives rely on counting sheep—or sheep in elephants’ clothing.  An instinctive Machiavellian even as a child, and dimly conscious of the reality of power, I preferred to count rulers.  In elementary school I learned the American presidents, and in high school I...

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. (The weather not their mind they change who rush across the sea.) Horace’s tagline is generally cited to illustrate the American cliché that, wherever you may go, you cannot run away from yourself.  In a country where divorce is more common than marriage, where millions every year...

The shooting of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman have divided the country along predictable lines: blacks and whites, “liberals” (that is to say, self-hating European-American leftists) and “conservatives” (or, rather, confused liberals).  The racial conflict is entirely without interest except insofar as it tends to confirm what everyone in America knows by...