I made my way to Florence from Cortina d’Ampezzo, where for the past half-century the Italian bourgeoisie had pretended to ski while in reality merely promenading in opulent furs in front of the Hotel de la Poste in postprandial stupefaction. This year, however, the resort was a ghost town, and not only on account of...
Category: Columns
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Do Androids Tweet…?
The America depicted in the news is every day coming closer to the dystopian future imagined by science-fiction novelists. I am not referring so much to the rising tide of violence and irrationality that has overtaken our society at all levels as to the systematic spiritual, intellectual, and social desolation of our public culture. One...
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Rumors of War Receding
This column was written on Orthodox Easter, but the reminder that Christ is risen is not the only reason for its upbeat tone. There is good news on several foreign fronts, making a major new war less likely today than at any time since the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq was announced last October....
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Looks Can Be Deceiving
Whoever came up with the liberal platitude that “Children have to be taught to hate” was either a liar or a fool, or both. He certainly never had children of his own, and, if it weren’t impossible, I’d say he must never have been a child himself. There was plenty of ethnic strife in my...
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Bullseye!
The Hunger Games Produced and distributed by Lionsgate Directed by Gary Ross Written by Suzanne Collins and Gary Ross Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is the first volume of a trilogy set in a not-too-distant future. An unspecified apocalyptic event has destroyed much of North America, and a new state named Panem has arisen...
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The Shot Heard Round the World
While nearly all my college students had heard of Lexington and Concord and the first battle of our Revolutionary War, only rarely did any of them know why the British were marching on the small Massachusetts towns. During the summer of 1774, Gen. Thomas Gage, supported by a squadron of the Royal Navy and five...
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Guess Who Came to Dinner?
In John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, a young black con man traduces his way into a white, rich, liberal family’s midst by posing as the college son of Sidney Poitier who has lost his credit card and wallet. The guilt-ridden rich folk put him up with the predictable results. The family is almost...
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Texas’s Pound of Pluck
Hello friends and neighbors in Mason and surrounding counties. Attention! Be a vic-tor, not a vic-tim! We will be having a beginners’ concealed-handgun class this coming Wednesday . . . at Keller’s Riverside Store on the beautiful Llano River. . . . We will attempt to teach you all the necessary information you need to...
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A Capital Mars
John Carter Produced and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures Directed by Andrew Stanton Written by Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Under the Moons of Mars in 1911, introducing the character John Carter, he did so in a mood of desperation. At 35, with a wife and two...
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French Boors and Chinese Whores
Here we go again, sports fans! During a recent tennis match between two professionals in Indian Wells, California, a racial slur uttered by one of the players has the usual suspects up in arms. The first off the bat was, of course, the newspaper that prints only what fits p.c., the dreadful Big Bagel Times. ...
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Beating Down Greece
I was sad to read that the Attikon Cinema on Stadiou Street in central Athens was burned down by anarchist scum pretending to protest against the E.U. Nazis. The Attikon was built in 1870 as part of a beautiful, ochre-colored neoclassical edifice constructed by a German architect, only to be torched 142 years later by...
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Baudelaire in Russia
I have known since adolescence—though in Soviet Russia it was all a bit hard to believe, these United States of ours being, after all, the Manichaean pole of Light—that Edgar Allan Poe was completely unknown in America and would have perished in obscurity had he not found a literary agent in Charles Baudelaire and a...
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An American Revolution
On January 17—less than 24 hours after presenting his credentials—the new U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, met with a group of Russian opposition figures, “civil-society activists,” and street-demonstration leaders at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. It was a provocative first move, the equivalent of a new Russian ambassador in Washington ostentatiously hosting the leaders...
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Dead Stars,Black Holes
The recent death of Whitney Houston elicited the handwringing and lamentations that are the hallmark of American journalism. Poor Amy, poor Whitney, poor Michael, poor Notorious—they were so young, and they had so much to live for. What a tragedy! The word tragedy is no longer applied to the death of worthy people who made...
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That New Car Smell
“Why are all the cars in the Super Bowl ads 2013s, if it’s only February of 2012?” It’s the kind of question only a 12-year-old boy like Stephen would think to ask; the rest of us long ago became accustomed to model-year creep, as the automakers knew that we would. When I was Stephen’s age,...
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Howling at the Heavens
The Grey Produced by 1984 Private Defense Contractors in association with Liddell Entertainment Directed by Joe Carnahan Script by Joe Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers from Jeffers’ story Distributed by Open Road Films We tell one another stories to help us face death, knowing the stalker to be ever at our heels. Not that...
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And Pastures New
Suppose you had to choose the single motion picture that dealt most seriously and challengingly with religious matters. What might it be? Offhand, I can think of a dozen or so possible answers from various countries, and probably most cinema-literate people would agree on at least a common short list. It’s a reasonable bet, though,...
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The Tuskegee Airmen
If you think political correctness is a recent phenomenon in America, then the longtime promulgation and perpetuation of distortions and falsehoods concerning the Tuskegee Airmen should disabuse you of such a notion. The very creation of the group was an attempt by President Franklin Roosevelt to showcase blacks in the war effort, which was dominated...
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Rage Against the Cowards
No matter how one looks at it, it wasn’t Italy’s finest hour. Not even Gabrielle d’Annunzio, poet, patriot, propagandist, and protofascist, could spin this into a maritime Titanic-like drama. Once the Costa Concordia hit a rock off the Tuscan coast, the behavior of the passengers and crew became an adverb, as in cowardly. This much...
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Aere Perennius
“Who?” This was said in a tone of voice that could only be described as doubtful. I was on the phone with an Italian friend in London, explaining that I could not call him back later that evening because I was off to a concert. “It’s Gergiev, Valery Gergiev. Don’t you know? He’s the most...
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Inventing the European Union
The rhetoric of “Europe” in its recognizably modern form dates back to the Thirty Years’ War. After all that they had done to each other between 1618 and 1648, Europeans were rightly embarrassed to talk of “Christendom” as a serious political concept. The last mention of a Christian commonwealth was made in the Peace of...
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Revolting Parasites
Movements are always based on lies, and the lies begin with the titles and slogans that are chosen to advance “the cause.” Here in the United States, so-called liberals are really nonrevolutionary Marxists, while the people who call themselves conservatives are, at one extreme, libertarian capitalists who reject any principle or experience that cannot be...
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The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference. When the Northern Illinois...
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Illusions and Disillusions
The Artist Produced by Le Petite Rein and Studio 37 Directed and written by Michel Hazanavicius Distributed by The Weinstein Company A Dangerous Method Produced by Recorded Picture Company Directed by David Cronenberg Screenplay by Christopher Hampton Distributed by Sony Pictures As I write, many critics have declared French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist...
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Those Racist Police
When I was last in the Big Bagel, as I call Noo Yawk, an heroic policeman with countless commendations for bravery and 22 years of front-line service was murdered in cold blood by a black drug dealer, Lamont Pride, the latter having previously been let loose by a black female judge who ignored a warrant...
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The Dream Dealer
When I hear of the books in the history of publishing that were self-published, I react like Lenin, who, on hearing of the 5,000 print run of Mayakovsky’s poem 150,000,000, scoffed that it was “a colossal waste of paper.” E.E. Cummings, for instance, published The Enormous Room at his own expense, petulantly dedicating it to...
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Lessons of the War
Tactics is merely The mechanical movement of bodies . . . After nearly nine years, about 4,500 Americans killed and 30,000 wounded and no one seems to know how many trillions of dollars it will cost in the end, the United States is finally doing what we should have done almost immediately, once we made...
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A Good and Faithful Servant
“MacKay.” I struggled for some time with how to render those six letters, in a vain attempt to convey some sense of what it was like to hear Pete pick up the other end of the phone line. I could never do justice to the experience. Somehow, Pete managed to stretch the two short syllables...
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Those Real Estate Blues
The Descendants Produced by Ad Hominem Enterprises Written and directed by Alexander Payne Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Young Adult Produced and Distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody (Brooke M. Busey) The Descendants and Young Adult are dark satiric comedies that insist on an unpopular thesis: Sexual misbehavior...
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Divine Wind
Many Americans today are left aghast at Adm. William F. Halsey’s admonition to U.S. forces in the Pacific: “Kill Japs. Kill Japs. Kill More Japs! You will help to kill the yellow bastards if you do your job well.” Yet those who fought through the island campaigns fully appreciated Halsey’s words, realizing the only way...
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Hoover Watch
I haven’t seen J. Edgar, the Hollywood movie about J. Edgar Hoover, and I don’t plan to, even though I have loved all of Clint Eastwood’s films, especially those he’s directed. Yet J. Edgar does not do it for me, as they say. It’s based on a lie, and a monstrous one at that: Hoover...
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A Sad Coincidence
If you’ve read enough Dickens, England is the land of coincidence, so I was not surprised to hear that a friend had sold his Northamptonshire family seat to a Russian. Nor was the congenital gambler in me incredulous when I learned that the new master of the estate was a keen reader of my stuff...
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Avoiding the Iranian Debacle
It takes neither unique intellectual brilliance nor supernaturally honed intuitive skills to predict the consequences of hazardous foreign-policy moves. On numerous occasions over the past decade and a half, I have advised against U.S. military interventions not because of my visceral isolationist zeal, but because I deemed the consequences of those actions to be contrary...
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In the Gutter With the GOP
The Republican Party’s search for a presidential candidate is a bit like a musical revue. As the star (Mitt Romney) goes up and down the chorus line, one after another dancer emerges from obscurity into the spotlight, dazzles the audience for a few moments, before sinking back into the anonymous mass. Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann,...
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Bread and Circuses
A real loaf of bread is not that hard to make. Flour, water, yeast—that’s all it takes. A little salt and oil may change the flavor and texture for the better, but you can make a better loaf than any you can buy in an American supermarket with just three ingredients and a little heat. ...
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J. Edgar Who?
J. Edgar Produced by Imagine Entertainment and Malpaso Productions Directed by Clint Eastwood Written by Dustin Lance Black Distributed by Warner Bros. Entertainment Director Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar opens with the June 2, 1919, bomb attack on the Washington, D.C., home of Atty. Gen. Alexander Mitchell Palmer. As Palmer and his wife come dazedly...
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The Christian in the Cave
I have a continuing interest in popular historical mythology—that is, the yawning gulf that separates what really happened in the past from what large numbers of even quite well-educated individuals think occurred. Given contemporary cultural debates, it is scarcely surprising that such myths commonly focus on religious themes, usually to the massive disadvantage of religion,...
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No More Ladies and Gentlemen
A recent libel case won by Lady Moore, wife of Sir Roger Moore of James Bond fame, called for my testimony in London, and for once I was happy to oblige. Roger Moore is a friend of very long standing, as is his son, Geoffrey, who lives 50 yards away from me in Gstaad. British...
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Devil’s Mama
The rockets that, according to Khrushchev, were coming off his production line “like sausages” ran on kerosene and liquid oxygen. So did Soviet foreign policy. The kerosene was operational secrecy, an ingredient virtually unchanged since the 1920’s, whereby the regime concealed its expansionist aims. The oxygen was maniacal braggadocio, which persuaded the West to see...
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Russian Reset in Peril
For all its many faults, the Obama administration has scored one notable success: It has done significantly better than its recent Republican and Democratic predecessors in normalizing relations with Russia. Washington’s visceral antagonism toward Moscow needed to be replaced by a more pragmatic, mutually beneficial relationship. The “Reset” has been imperfectly applied, but its conceptual...
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Rome and Jerusalem
I shall not cease from mental fight Nor shall my sword sleep in my mind Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land. William Blake was quite mad, even madder than most Swedenborgians—and that is saying a good deal—but Christians less insane than Blake have dreamed of building a new Jerusalem where...
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Of Candidates and Clowns
The Ides of March Produced by Smoke House Directed by George Clooney Written by Grant Heslov, George Clooney, and Beau Willimon from Willimon’s play, Farragut North Distributed by Columbia Pictures George Clooney’s film The Ides of March is a behind-the-scenes look at a presidential primary race in contemporary Ohio. The behavior of the candidates...
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Bombing the West Coast
The “Battle of Los Angeles,” or the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, occurred during the early morning hours of February 25, 1942. It has been portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 1979 slapstick comedy 1941, starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. The farcical movie is about all younger generations today know of the Battle of Los Angeles...
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Picking Apples
When I sat down to write my Virtual Realities column for October (“Success(ion)”), I was fairly certain the end was near for Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. I had privately told some friends (and fellow Apple stockholders) a few months earlier that I thought he would not make it to the end of the year. His...
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Fun With Panthers
The black American fugitive who was recently caught after 41 years on the lam brought back lots of memories. No, I’ve never been a fugitive from justice, and the memories are quite pleasant, because I met all those so-called Black Liberation Army con men in Algeria just about the time George Wright flew in from...
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Bulldozing Arcadia
Thirteen years ago I marched in one of the largest demonstrations in Britain’s history. The Countryside March had brought together environmental activists and critics of transnational business, dyed-in-the-wool Tories and leftover beatniks, peers and paupers. Today, if the ongoing Coalition versus the Countryside debate is any indication, it’s time to march again. In Greece, Megalopoli...
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Running On Empty
All imperial projects eventually come to grief. The causes, time spans, and forms of decline differ from one great power to the next and from one century to another, but they all have in common one important feature: At some point the weakening hegemon is no longer able to bear the economic and financial burden...
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The Gales of November
“You’re probably not going to like this,” David Dale Johnson said, “but I’m suggesting we ask the Board of Review to reduce the assessment by $30,000.” I had retained David as a hired gun in my attempt to get our house’s assessment, and thus our property taxes, lowered. David knows a thing or two about...
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The Tyranny of Democracy
Winston Churchill’s backhanded praise of democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried” is usually cited as the last word on the subject. It is a good way of closing off a dangerous topic of discussion, and it works quite well with that vast majority of people...
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Shane On Wheels
Drive Produced by Bold Films and Odd Lot Entertainment Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn Screenplay by Hossein Amini from the novel by James Sallis Distributed by Film District At the close of George Stevens’ 1953 big-screen version of Jack Schaefer’s novel, Shane, ten-year-old Joey Starrett (Brandon De Wilde) called repeatedly to his wounded idol,...