The word transformational surfaced often in the 2008 election season, and for once, the cliché might have had some validity. America assuredly is entering an era of transformation, even of revolutionary change, but on nothing like the lines that many expect. The political right stands to benefit enormously, provided its adherents understand the dramatically altered...
Category: Columns
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Down Goes the Mammoth
So, the great nation builder is leaving the White House, his vision of a peaceful Middle East just a pipe dream, something poor old W used to know something about. I say poor old W because he was, after all, taken in by his very own Vice President, a treacherous and cowardly man, a character...
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Uncle Sam’s Harem
These days bipolarism appears to be the “in” childhood malady touted by leftist psychologists, who previously promoted ADHD to explain away the disturbed behavior exhibited by postmodern children and adolescents. The list of problems is long: antisocial behavior, poor performance in school, sexual promiscuity; depression and suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism; violence and random acts...
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Media Bias Revisited
Complaints about “media bias” usually boil down to uninteresting charges that the news media tilt their reportage in favor of one party—usually, but not always, the Democrats. So say the Republicans, with some justice, but put this way the indictment is somewhat superficial. Conservatives more keenly accuse those media of being “liberal”—that is, principled enough...
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A New Grand Strategy
Strategy is the art of winning wars, and grand strategy is the philosophy of maintaining an acceptable peace. America is good at the former and often confused on the latter. Making the world safe for democracy (Wilson 1917) or fighting freedom’s fight ordained by history (Bush 2002) may be dismissed as tasteless yet harmless rhetoric...
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Blubbering
Body of Lies Produced by De Line Pictures and Scott Free Productions Directed by Ridley Scott Screenplay by William Monahan Distributed by Warner Brothers Director Ridley Scott and his scenarist William Monahan adapted Body of Lies from David Ignatius’ novel of the same title. The narrative is yet another sorry tale of our military presence...
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In Praise of Having Not
A splendid Traviata at Palermo’s Teatro Massimo the other night—with its colorful gambling scene at the close of the Second Act, when a jealous Alfredo wins an armful of banknotes only to throw them in Violetta’s face—made me think of nothing. Nothing as an end in itself, nothing as the animating spirit of all sublunar...
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Losing Our Minds
Most years, writing a column that is due on October 15 for an issue cover-dated December, which will go to press six days before a general election but appear in subscribers’ mailboxes and on newsstands about two weeks after, would be a recipe for frustration. This year, it strikes me as an opportunity. I have...
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The Monkey Chronicles
I want to make something very, very clear. This column’s review of the autobiography of Cheeta, Tarzan’s chimpanzee, has absolutely nothing to do with the man who just got elected to the White House last month. Cheeta’s 336-page opus was published in Britain two months ago by Fourth Estate and has become a runaway best-seller. ...
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Merry Christmas, Pinhead
Twelve long months ago, America was in the throes of Holiday Shopping Season ’07. It was a simpler time. The Dow was safely over 10,000, and we were all wondering whether it would be Hillary or Giuliani in the White House come January ’09. I push my cart carrying 250 pounds of chicken feed up...
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Christmas Nightmares
Like many children growing up in the 1950’s, he looked forward to Halloween even more than to Christmas. It was, admittedly, a difficult choice, because at Halloween, all he got was candy or a disappointing piece of fruit, while Christmas was a bigger bonanza even than his birthday. Nonetheless, after the anticipations of Christmas Eve...
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Whither the Republic?
This month, we shall have an answer to an all-important question: Which arm of our bipartisan party state will occupy the White House for the next four years? This is an issue second in importance only to such urgent American questions as “When will Britney Spears be allowed to see her kids?” “How much weight...
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Unstable Multipolarity
It is professionally vexing and personally alarming for a world-affairs analyst in today’s America that neither rationality nor consistency can be taken for granted among the foreign-policy community in Washington, D.C. That much has become obvious from the crisis in relations between the United States and Russia over Georgia. This crisis heralds a particularly dangerous...
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The Hobbyist
The joyous return to Rancho Juárez was dampened, but in no way spoiled, by a certified letter awaiting Mr. and Mrs. Héctor Villa on their arrival. Mailed from the Belen Municipal Court, it threatened their daughter with juvenile detention if she did not return within ten days’ time to complete her court-ordered work with Darfur...
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Those Dying Generations
Elegy Produced by Lakeshore Entertainment Directed by Isabel Coixet Screenplay by Nicholas Meyer from a novel by Philip Roth Distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films Burn After Reading Produced by Relativity Media and Studio Canal Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen Distributed by Focus Features Elegy, Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s adaptation of Philip Roth’s...
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A Sicilian Visit
In Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, an aging billionairess returns to the provincial town where she was born and announces to the townsfolk that she will leave them all her money, on one condition. They must kill the man, himself now aging, who deceived her years ago. The townsfolk noisily reject the lady’s proposition as immoral, but...
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The Audacity of Dopes
No one expected the vote to be so close. After Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech in St. Paul, the Republicans were certain they had found a rock star to compete with Barack Obama. They could ride the crest of Palinmania all the way to the Oval Office. All they had to do was keep the hockey...
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Before the Cacophony
Can anyone today imagine a clarinettist as a superstar the size of, say, Mick Jagger? Or God forbid, the ghastly Madonna? Well, 60 years or so ago, the biggest star in Hollywood, as well as the biggest stud, was Artie Shaw, whose combination of good looks, extraordinary musical talent, and great intelligence made him the...
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The Audacity of Hate
Barack Obama has a problem, and if it were not for this one problem, he would easily be elected president. As it is, because of this problem, the impossible John McCain actually has a chance. The problem is white people. Yes, it is true that the majority of Obama supporters are white people, but most...
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Caucasian Trap
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s order to attack South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, was a breathtakingly audacious challenge to Russia, to which she was bound to respond forcefully. That response was promptly exploited by the American mainstream media machine and the foreign-policy community in Washington to paint Russia as a rogue power that is not only dangerous...
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Reprise in Vegas
The long drive from Belen to Rancho Juárez seemed to Héctor an endless agony. He found the place in the greatest confusion, AveMaría vacillating between grim determination and hysterics as she packed a suitcase, Jesús “Eddie” tramping back and forth in the sitting room, shaking his fist and vowing to track down Contracepción’s fiendish paramour...
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Fastest Jewish Gun in the West
Frank Gallop’s 1966 spoof recording, “The Ballad of Irving,” left most people laughing heartily. (“He came from the old Bar Mitzvah spread, / With a 10-gallon yarmulke on his head. / He always followed his mother’s wishes. / Even on the range he used two sets of dishes.”) What nearly no one knew then and...
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The Psychopathic Press
According to medical consensus, a psychopath is a person who feels no connection with other people, and who cannot therefore know the slightest remorse, any shame or guilt, no matter how horrendous the sufferings he inflicts. And that brings me, neatly, to the New York Times, the nation’s newspaper of record, and an exemplar of...
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A Rough Sea Petrified
Vicky Cristina Barcelona Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company Written and directed by Woody Allen Warning: In the review that follows, I have given away any number of plot points of the film. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen has traveled farther from his beloved Manhattan than ever before but not an inch...
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Classifying Italy
The neighbor’s house sported a prato inglese that required ostentatious watering at the crack of dawn, and by the reassuring suppleness of the English lawn beneath our feet we all knew that our host was a gentleman, not some television mogul from Cinecittà out of Rome whom, of a morning, one would be embarrassed to...
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Diversity Is Our Strength
As the summer slid into August, gasoline prices fell a bit, back to about $3.79 per gallon here in the Midwest, and even that modest reprieve seemed to dispel some of the summertime blues. Traffic on the interstates around Lake Michigan was not quite up to normal August levels (on Sunday afternoon of the second...
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Putin and the Polish Gesture
In 2002, Vladimir Putin told a French reporter who asked about “innocent civilians” killed in Chechnya that—since the journalist evidently sympathized with Muslims—he would arrange to have him circumcised, adding: “I will recommend that they conduct the operation in such a way so that afterwards nothing else will grow.” People of the pompous persuasion were...
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Walking Distance
This is an age in which news of a tragedy garners a response such as this: “Well, our thoughts are with you.” Happy thoughts full of Pelagian grace. It is therefore with some reservation that I now examine Rocky Twyman’s direct and public prayer to the Almighty, a supplication he no doubt offers with full...
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Words and Power
Most American presidents, unless they leave office in disgrace, are honored by having airports, schools, libraries, streets, and even whole cities named after them. The city of San Francisco has saluted President George W. Bush in a singular way—by naming a sewage-treatment plant after him. Of course, this reminds us that the city on the...
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Chinese Monkeys on Our Backs
An eminent British statesman once confessed to Horace Walpole that he had learned all he knew of the Wars of the Roses from reading Shakespeare’s histories. I do not recall who the statesman was, and I am only guessing that Walpole is the source of the anecdote. As is the case of most of what...
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Chronicle of an Announced Arrest
The media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on July 21 was based entirely on the doctrine of nonequivalence inaugurated in 1992: Serb crimes are bad and justly exaggerated; Muslim crimes are understandable. This doctrine was spectacularly reiterated a month before Karadzic’s capture, when the Muslim wartime commander of...
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Forerunners
Brideshead Revisited Produced by BBC Films and Ecosse Films Directed by Julian Jarrold Screenplay by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock from the Evelyn Waugh novel Distributed by Miramax Films The Dark Knight Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by Christopher Nolan Screenplay by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is not...
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Return to McSorrento
In the 1970’s, when I lived in America, McDonald’s, apart from being a fast-food chain, was a powerful symbol of everything that was wrong with that country. Neither I nor anybody I knew ever referred to the leviathan as a source of nourishment; invariably, its name was placed in a quarantine of ironic quotation marks,...
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Lighting Candles
I cannot remember when I first met Mary Ann Aiello. I know, of course, that it had to have been sometime after I moved to Rockford in the last week of 1995, and I suspect that it may have been another three or four years later. But there was something about Mary Ann that made...
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Send in the Clowns
Karagiozis is a mythical Greek character created sometime during the Ottoman occupation (1455-1827). He manages to outwit the Turk at every turn by being funny, dishonest at times, and a very quick thinker. For example, he discusses a business with a Turk and proposes an equal sharing of the wealth. “What’s yours is mine,” he...
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No More Girls in Bikinis
Just after the Berlin wall came down, I flew to Berlin with my German-Austrian wife and traveled around the city and its eastern parts. On visiting the Olympic stadium I told the taxi driver that my uncle, a hurdler, was the first athlete the Führer’s gaze fell upon as the parade of the 1936 games...
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Lost in the 50’s
It was about 1965, in Jimmy Dengate’s “club” in Charleston, when I got my first clue to what the 50’s had been all about. I met an unusual sportswriter. Let us call him Jack, if only because it was his real name. Jack was unusual, because he could write decent prose, knew something about sports,...
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“¡Mi Casa es su Casa!”
Héctor woke on New Year’s morning with a reverberating headache that made his wife’s remonstrations (in the pinch, AveMaría had been appointed an emergency designated driver to take the party home safely the night before) the more painful to bear. He felt thoroughly ashamed of himself—first for getting drunk, and second for . . ....
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The E.U.S.S.R. Marches On
The coalition of multicultural fanatics, postnational technocrats, neo-Marxists, and crooks who run the European Union had warned, until the very day of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (June 13), that its rejection would sound the death knell for the “united Europe” and mark the end of the world as we know it. But...
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Good Night, Shyamalan
The Happening Produced and distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox and UTV Motion Pictures Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan The star of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, The Happening, demonstrates once more how unaccountably loathe producers are to give their boom microphones top billing. During the showing I attended last night, the boom mike...
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Letter From a Hot Town
Cimabue the painter, passing on the road to Bologna, saw, as he walked through the village of Vespignano, a boy called Giotto drawing a sheep on a flat piece of rock. This was the moment with which, more than a century later, Lorenzo Ghiberti, the sculptor and the first art historian of the Renaissance, began...
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Summertime Blues
Driving from Rockford to St. Paul, Minnesota, is a bit like going back in time. St. Paul (like La Crosse, Wisconsin, where we crossed over the Mississippi River just hours before it began to burst its banks) is relatively well preserved, unlike its clearly fraternal twin. Much of the city is stunningly beautiful—from the immaculately...
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Out With the Old
My grandfather has congestive heart failure. I hate to say it, but I probably won’t see him this time next year. “Gramp,” as I’ve called him since I can remember, taught me how to shoot and hunt, taught me how to change the oil, taught me how to drive a truck, taught me how to...
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Art in the Loo
Christie’s, the auction house, took a full-page ad in the New York Times to publicize the record sale of a painting by a living artist, Lucian Freud, to the tune of $33.6 million. Thirty-three million greenbacks for a portrait of a horribly fat woman lying naked on a misshapen sofa. The mind reels. It is...
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Pickwickian Popery
I’ve been reading Garry Wills for more than 40 years now, with mixed admiration, delight, and alarm. In the early 60’s he wrote for National Review, the youngest of its many brilliant contributors. He then seemed to be an orthodox Catholic and political conservative; but that began to change in 1968, when he suddenly matured...
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Bush’s Whips, McCain’s Scorpions
“He [John McCain] did everything that we asked of him, including arming the KLA.” —Albanian lobbyist Joe DioGuardi When I hear the word Belgrade pronounced, I can almost smell the soft coal smoke tainting the chilly air of early spring. Waking in the Palace Hotel on Toplicin Venac, the slightly sour smell has filled the...
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Wogs
Iron Man Produced by Marvel Studios Directed by John Favreau Screenplay by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby Distributed by Paramount Pictures The Visitor Produced by Groundswell Productions Directed and written by Thomas McCarthy Distributed by Overture Films It is always reassuring when a big-budget superhero film fulfills its responsibility to edify the young. Iron...
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What’s Good for Rockford Acromatics
Dean Olson, the chairman of Rockford Acromatic Products, an after-market auto-parts manufacturer, is a longtime supporter of Republican candidates. Still, he is not optimistic about the November election: “Even though the Democrats are in full rout, we’re not able to mount an effective challenge. I don’t see the leadership there.” While Rockford voters lean Democratic,...
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If My Daddy Could See Me Now
September 11, 2001, we are often told, “changed everything.” In Washington, D.C., and Baghdad, Iraq, that may have been true. President George W. Bush and a handful of his advisors, who had been itching for a fight with Iraq since before the inauguration, now saw their opening. It would take another year and a half...
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Speaking of Gorging
A few weeks ago, I attended a most wonderful party, with music, pretty girls, lots of champagne—and even some people who did not move their lips while reading the labels of the expensive bubbly and Scotch whiskey they were imbibing. Namely, Tom Wolfe, Lewis Lapham, Graydon Carter, Edward Jay Epstein, and other such New York swells....