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...
Category: Columns
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...
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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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John Wayne and World War II
Ever since I can remember, John Wayne has been the actor the left most loves to hate. While the left’s criticisms of him are many, the one that seemed to have the most validity was his failure to serve his country during World War II. “He’s a big phony,” I was told by leftist classmates...
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Books and Lovers
Back in 1839, an Englishman by the name of Alexander Walker wrote a manual by the name of Woman, in which he quoted Hume: “Among the inferior creatures, nature herself, being the supreme legislator, prescribes all the laws which regulate their marriages, and varies those laws according to the different circumstances of the creature.” So...
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Voting for Monarchy
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...
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All in a Stew
I don’t want to be harsh on people, but the emotional life of our epoch reminds me of central Moscow in the old Soviet days, a time when there was everything. There were billboards advertising cigarettes and the national lottery. There were competent doctors and crooked lawyers. There were chauffeur-driven limousines; there were girl Fridays...
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Forgetting China
I am unusual among American conservatives in feeling quite positive about the rise of a strong and prosperous China. Not long since, I was exploring Beijing’s thronged Wangfujing Street, which is consumer heaven, and it was sobering to realize that the ancestors of virtually all those prosperous customers would have been permanently hungry peasants who...
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The Blowback
On September 24 I embarked on a week-long tour of Tunisia, hoping to learn more on the aftermath of last year’s revolution and the state of political play ahead of the elections, which are due before the year’s end. The findings are surprising. The country looks and feels civilized, roadside trash notwithstanding. It is safe...
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Lawless Enforcement
Lawless Produced by Benaroya Pictures Directed by John Hillcoat Screenplay by Nick Cave from the novel by Matt Bondurant Distributed by The Weinstein Company Whenever I think of Prohibition movies, I inevitably see Jimmy Cagney smiling rakishly as he shrugs his shoulders to make sure his double-breasted jacket drapes just so. He’s the city-boy...
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Meet Me at Mary’s Place
I got a picture of you in my locket I keep it close to my heart A light shining in my breast Leading me through the dark . . . The fog outside the window glows in the moments before dawn. The sun will soon rise, but I won’t be able to see it. The...
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Stimulus Scam
Bernie Ecclestone is a gnomish Brit ex-grease monkey who is my neighbor in Gstaad, the small alpine Swiss village that once upon a time was the Mecca of the old rich and titled, now slowly turning into the playground of the nouveau riche and vulgar. I’ve often written about Bernie because, for a very short...
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“We Want the World, and We Want It Now!”
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...
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Grand Strategy Revisited
In an election campaign dominated by domestic issues, foreign themes have appeared as isolated snippets. Questions regarding what to do about Syria or Iran, or how to manage relations with China and Russia, produce stock responses unrelated to the broad picture. These are among the most important questions facing political decisionmakers, foreign-policy practitioners, and their...
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Bats and Weasels
The Dark Knight Rises Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Christopher Nolan Written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Hope Springs Produced by Escape Artists and Mandate Pictures Directed by David Frankel Written by Vanessa Taylor Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Christopher Nolan doesn’t do things by halves. His third Batman movie, The Dark Knight...
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Ace of Aces: Richard Bong
He was an all-American boy who became an American hero in World War II. Born in 1920 to a father who, at the age of five, had immigrated to the United States with his family from Sweden and an American-born mother of Irish, Scottish, and English descent, Dick Bong was reared on a farm a...
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Likud’s Long Con
Here we go again! Scary sofa-samurai Robert Kagan, a neocon foreign-policy “scholar,” is also an expert on war, having watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Kagan says that, if Obama were to use force against Iran, the election would be over—he would win overwhelmingly. Kagan and his brother are inside-the-Beltway hucksters, always hustling and doing...
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Men Men Men Men Manly Men Men Men
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...
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Souvenir of Florence
Among the great city states of Italy—for city states they remain, a world unto itself every one, despite the advent of the steam locomotive and the electric carrot peeler—Florence was never my favorite. When I lived there, I loathed its American present as the art student’s medina, with its disheveled, Nebraskan, notionally female multitudes swarming...
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VENONA
I faithfully read the New York Review of Books as a prime source of hilarious writing and self-parody. Sometimes though, the absurdities reach such a height as to demand comment. Recently, a Gail Collins rant in NYRB described “How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us,” claiming that the economic power of that state’s educational system...
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Worst Secretary of State in History
Attending a “holiday party” at the State Department in December 2010, President Obama congratulated himself on appointing Hillary Clinton and declared that “there’s a consensus building that [she] may be one of the best secretaries of state we’ve ever had in this country’s history.” She is relentless, tough, and does not quit, Obama said, “so,...
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Responsibilities
Savages Produced by Relativity Media Directed by Oliver Stone Written by Shane Salerno and Don Winslow from Winslow’s novel Distributed by Universal Pictures The Amazing Spider-Man Produced by Marvel Entertainment Directed by Marc Webb Written by James Vanderbilt and Alvin Sargent Distributed by Columbia Pictures Directed by Oliver Stone, Savages is an adaptation of...
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Calling a Spade a Spade
Nicholas Soames is Winston Churchill’s grandson—his mother being Winny’s only living child—a Conservative member of Parliament since the mid-70’s, a very large man whose food and drink intake is legendary, and an old friend of mine with whom I used to get into terrible trouble (but the less said about that the better). Soames has...
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Escapist Fantasies
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...
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Under Sicilian Eyes
The last time I was in Austria was embarrassingly long ago, but I recall one characteristic moment. We were staying in a tiny hotel that occupied the second and third floors of a handsome Viennese townhouse, and once, well past midnight, we rang the wrong bell. Whereupon the paterfamilias of the first-floor apartment appeared on...
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The Myth of the “Arab Spring”
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. The ongoing enthusiasm of the Western elites for Islam, in general, and for the misnamed Arab Spring, in particular, is a case in point. The bitter fruits of the latter—simultaneously visible but differently manifested in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria—are rooted in the character of the...