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...
Category: Columns
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Return to Short Creek
Recently, the state of Texas undertook a police action that amply demonstrates the radical transformation of public attitudes to family, children, and the role of the state over the past half-century. In April 2008, Texas authorities staged mass raids on a polygamist compound near San Angelo, in which they took custody of several hundred children. ...
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Lieutenant Ramsey’s War
Ed Ramsey never aspired to be a hero. He was only 12 years old when his father committed suicide. He was a natural-born hell-raiser; bootleg whiskey and fighting were his passions. His mother thought the Oklahoma Military Academy might salvage him. He loved horses and all things martial. The academy had both. Ramsey thrived at...
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Curiosity as a Social Force
“Curious Barbara’s got her nose in a sling,” goes the Russian admonition against prurience, more puzzling, if anything, than the equivalent English adage concerning the killing, in similarly umbrageous circumstances, of the cat. Why should Barbara meet with such a fate? Just how did it happen that curiosity brought about the death of Fluffy? As...
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Stop It
Stop-Loss Produced by Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions, and MTV Films Directed by Kimberly Peirce Screenplay by Kimberly Peirce and Mark Richard Distributed by Paramount Pictures On March 29, 2008, Suffolk County police officers vigorously fulfilled their sworn duty at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, New York. Alerted by the mall’s security...
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The Pursuit of Happiness
“This used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.” When people of a certain age and experience begin to think about when and how America went wrong, they almost inevitably hear echoes of George Hanson’s little sermon, delivered by Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. An ACLU...
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For Better and For Worse
That Christmas was, in every respect, the horror Héctor had feared it would be. Homesick, broke, unchurched (AveMaría, after the second round-trip drive to the Assemblies of God church in Lordsburg, had decided to hold a Sunday prayer service at home instead), cooped together like rats in a cage, the Villas, with the Juárezes, endured...
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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....
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The Rhetoric of Fashion
“For his birthday his wife gave him a riding crop that cost 100 francs,” a writer called Arnold Ruge complained of his newly married friend, a fellow German émigré in Paris, and the poor fool does not ride, nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to have, a carriage, smart clothes, a...
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The Postmodern Sneer
Funny Games Produced by Celluloid Dreams Directed and written by Michael Haneke Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures After seeing Austrian director Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, I experienced an unaccustomed urge. I wanted to buy a .45. I’m sure this was not the reaction Haneke was hoping for, but he can hardly complain. After all,...
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Beastie Boys
After the recent shootings on the campus of Northern Illinois University, network-news programs were filled with helpful proposals for dealing with the growing problem of school violence. The suggestions were the predictably inane and irrelevant products of post-Christianity’s impoverished imagination: more counseling for shocked and grieving students, a university warning system complete with a database...
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Smokers in the Arsenal
Several years after he was forced into retirement, Otto von Bismarck was asked what could start the next major war. “Europe today is a powder keg,” he replied, “and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal . . . I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you...
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Tan, Rested, and Ready
“I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.” The inauguration of the first black president of the United States on January...
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City of Light, Summer of Hate
It was the merry month of May, 40 years ago. I had been living in Paris for a decade, had just moved into a beautiful farmhouse ten miles west of the city, had recently become a bachelor again at age 31, and had given up competitive tennis for polo and the Bagatelle polo club. My...
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Dealing With the Devil
I do not normally take pronouncements from show-business folk seriously—they are almost always publicity ploys—but in the Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg case against Beijing’s “Genocide Olympics,” I will gladly make an exception. We all know that there is something rotten at the heart of modern sport, starting with the Olympics, which was, once upon...
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The Country of the Blind
In the 1960’s and 70’s, when European countries were admitting large migrant populations from predominantly Muslim regions, Western governments had a powerful vested interest in encouraging the growth of politicized Islam of the straitest sect. European political attitudes were shaped absolutely by the Cold War confrontation, and the Middle East featured chiefly as a theater...
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Payback for Pearl Harbor
I was recently visiting with an old Marine Corps buddy, Ralph Willis, at his home on California’s central coast. At 86, he is one of the fortunate few who are still alive to describe their experiences fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. Ralph put down some of his memories in My...
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Lobar Warming
Scoffers may deride the proposition I find instinctively plausible, that the consonants and the vowels of speech are its masculine and feminine constituents, though the same scoffers would not think to keep a professor from speaking of male rhymes or an electrician of female plugs. Yet the role of women in many societies, historically considered,...
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Shaming
Knocked Up Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by Judd Apatow Juno Produced and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Produced by Mobra Films Directed and written by Cristian Mungiu Distributed by IFC Films Thirty-five years ago,...
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Little Aristocracies of Our Own
How beastly the bourgeois is, Especially the male of the species D.H. Lawrence’s lines are still quoted, though most often by writers who know nothing else of his poetry. It is taken for granted that Lawrence was right to contemn the “middle-class values” of the whited sepulchers who pretend to virtues and tastes they do...
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In the Looking Glass
The holidays were fast approaching, and, for the first time in his life, Héctor could find no joy in the prospect of the Christmas season. Homesick, guilt-ridden, pinched in his wallet by his irregular business schedule, and worn down by the rigors of patrol with the Critter Company, he felt physically and mentally exhausted. The...
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Kosovo Crisis Becomes Global
The unilateral declaration of independence by the Albanian leadership in Kosovo on February 17, and the subsequent recognition of the new entity by the United States and most E.U. countries, crowned a decade and a half of iniquitous U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia. By recognizing “Kosova,” the White House has made a great leap...
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The Vanishing Middle (America)
The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, the politicians and pundits tell us every evening on the news. Lost in the rhetoric is any concern for members of the middle class, who are in danger of becoming nothing more than a footnote in future histories of the United States. If England...
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Scuppering the Serbs
I live in New York and London, and among the gruesome sights I’ve had to endure these last few years has been the sight of a vainglorious James Rubin, of Madeleine Albright fame, prancing about the hot spots of these multicultural havens for the rich and infamous. Rubin is married to Christiane Amanpour, the...
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National Religion
Americans are a people of deeply held religious conviction. If any has doubts, let him look on the most serious of our sacred holidays and believe. Naturally, it is a federal holiday, but that fact alone does not convey the magnitude of this special day. For, unlike other federal holidays, this one carries with it...
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Memoirs of a Bridegroom
If the typical life of a young couple resembles an Oriental bazaar, where the clamoring for jewels, perfumes, spices, silks, and other aphrodisiac appurtenances of fata morgana breaks on the morose tightfistedness of those who can afford them, in my case the reverse was true, not only because I could afford nothing, but because my...
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Marxist Obsessions
There Will Be Blood Produced and distributed by Miramax Films Directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson Many American film reviewers must labor under the spell of Marxist sentimentality. It’s as though they have never recovered from their undergraduate viewing of Battleship Potemkin (1925), Sergei Eisenstein’s clever but facile Soviet-propaganda film. Not surprisingly, whenever left-wing...
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The Future of Tyranny
My mother, an incurable Democrat, God forgive her, adored Adlai Stevenson. To her mind, he and Richard Nixon offered the extreme and opposite poles of spiritual reality, like Saint Michael and Lucifer. Among today’s politicians, Sen. Barack Obama inspires the same rare kind of devotion. I am not suggesting that this passion is warranted; on...
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Our Open (Borders) Secret
The long campaign of 2007-08, already sputtering out in fizzled squibs, childish ploys, and pointless personal recriminations, has offered few of the moments of drama or high comedy that Americans have rightly come to expect of our political candidates. The debates have been as drab as Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits, as wooden as Barack Obama’s imitation...
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Cupid’s Thunderbolt
In the weeks immediately following the encounter with the illegal immigrants in the arroyo, Jesús “Eddie” and Héctor were men possessed by a single idea, though not the same one. Jesús could think only of joining up with the recently formed Critter Company, based in El Paso but with a chapter in Deming, and fighting...
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Waiting for the Big One
The global economy is like the St. Andreas Fault. You know that a terminal disaster is inevitable, but you keep your fingers crossed and try not to think about it. When a tremor occurs, you often fear it could be the Big One and sometimes panic, but then, when the dust settles, you sigh with...
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Three Coins
The weather in Rome has been on the chilly side, but compared with Rockford in January, it’s positively balmy. Warm enough, in fact, to risk a charge of heresy (or at least philistinism) by capping the first full day of The Rockford Institute’s 2008 Winter School with, not a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, but a...
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The Words of Muhammad (PBUH)
When confronted with an American convert to Islam who has studied overseas, it’s hard not to think today of the celebrated case of John Walker Lindh, “the American Taliban” captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and brought back to the United States to stand trial. “Abdul” knows that, yet he’s chosen to be brutally honest...
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Taking the Mickey
In an English court of law 21 years ago, I had the opportunity to discover firsthand how touchy judges can be when challenged from the dock. It was a case of libel that caught both the tabloid and broadsheet imagination, not to mention the BBC’s. I had referred to a very rich old woman as...
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Total Accuracy
I was married once. Twice, actually. No, just the once, really, because the union had been annulled before I married again for the second or, rather, the first time, on the legal grounds of mutual and substantial misunderstanding. In reality, just then I had met the woman who would become my second or nearly first...
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Who’s That Angel of Death?
No Country for Old Men Produced and distributed by Miramax Films Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen It’s not often that an audience gasps at the end of a movie and shouts, “What?” or “You’ve got to be kidding” at the screen. But that’s just what several people did in the theater in...