Category: Vital Signs

What is the role of the poet in society?  In a frequently misunderstood remark, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in “A Defence of Poetry” (1821) that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”  Shelley’s idea is that poets shape our view of ourselves and the world, which in turn shapes the very course of history...

Law professors like to debate among themselves which of the U.S. Supreme Court’s many opinions is the very worst.  There has been a general consensus that the most loathsome is the one in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Court decided that the right to hold slaves in the territories was a “fundamental...

Hand it to Ann Coulter and Donald Trump: They know how to send the left into an apoplectic conniption.  Coulter’s contribution to the left’s unhinged tantrum is her book on immigration, ¡Adios America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole.  Coulter has gone “full racist,” we are told, because she...

There’s something admirably old-fashioned about a British general election.  Instead of the two years of incessant blather we get over here (“Just 11 weeks until the first GOP debate!” I heard recently on FOX News), the whole thing is over inside a month.  The odds are good that nobody will call you in that period...

In some ways—even more than Japan and the People’s Republic of China—South Korea is dominating key U.S. markets.  I’ve noticed this for years in Orange County, where Hyundai North America just built its new $200 million U.S. headquarters in Fountain Valley, the city next to where I live in Huntington Beach.  It’s double the size...

In June, the Supreme Court greatly augmented executive power by holding that the president has the exclusive right to grant formal recognition to a foreign sovereign.  This decision further pushes presidential power in the direction of royal prerogative through which monarchs enjoy the exclusive care over foreign affairs to the detriment of the people’s representatives....

It seems to me that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos. . . . Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that western culture has stood...

G.K. Chesterton had a low opinion of his own abilities as a novelist.  “[M]y real judgment of my own work,” he confessed, “is that I have spoilt a number of jolly good ideas in my time”: I think The Napoleon of Notting Hill was a book very well worth writing; but I am not sure...

Few jazz pianists are “accompanists” as gifted in knowledge, technique, and taste as Norman Simmons, able to back vocalists with consummate skill in chording, passing notes, and background lines, but also wise in the use of space.  “A pianist is a piano player—that’s different from accompanying,” Simmons said recently, as he approached his 85th birthday. ...

In 1833 James Fenimore Cooper returned from a European tour to Coopers town—founded by his father, one of the first pioneers into the dangerous frontier of New York beyond the Hudson Valley.  Cooper property included a pretty peninsula on Lake Otsego that the family had allowed the community to use for fishing, picnics, and boating. ...

Ralph Sarchie exudes an aura of intense strength when he walks into a room.  A fit, middle-aged man with heavily tattooed arms (pictures of his daughters and tough cop tattoos, like one that reads New York Untouchables) and a buzz cut, who speaks with a Queens accent straight out of Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas, Sarchie has...

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well written, or badly written.  That is all.”         —Oscar Wilde, from the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde wrote several first-rate plays, on which his literary reputation principally rests, and a number of mostly...

Political correctness has it that immigration is a perennial phenomenon in Western countries.  This is preposterous.  Immigration as we know it today is an extremely recent phenomenon. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, they say.  This is just plain ridiculous.  A small group of people leaving their country to found their...

It has been argued that, after Shakespeare, Charles Dickens is the finest writer in the English language.  His works have forged their way into the canon to such a degree that it is much more difficult to know which of his novels to leave off the recommended reading list than it is to choose which...

I once presumptuously thought I knew what “political science” was (Aristotle told me), and I even remembered Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics, but I was wrong—again.  Is there is p-p-pattern developing here? Yes, there is a New Political Science that is a contemporary Zeitgeist, and I am talking about what happens when “science” is...

Havilah Babcock was a teacher who was once one of the best-known educators in South Carolina and a writer who had a national audience.  Today, few remember him.  This is partly because of the passage of time—Babcock died in 1964.  It is more owing to changes in American life and literature. Babcock was a proud...

Of course Scotland won’t leave the United Kingdom.  That was the conventional wisdom when the referendum on Scottish independence was announced two years ago.  But today no one is quite certain what the outcome will be.  The referendum is scheduled for September 18, and polls indicate that a majority of Scots favor staying in the...

In person, jazz pianist Jimmy Rowles was a cutup, a card, a madcap presence, a piece of work.  After coming east from California in 1973, he would appear often, sometimes for weeks at a time, at Bradley’s, The Cookery, The Knickerbocker, Michael’s Pub, and other top New York City piano rooms, usually in duos with...

As World War I is remembered in this year of its hundredth anniversary, one rivalry continues to resonate across America.  It isn’t between the Allies and the Central Powers, or between two houses of European royalty, but between two countrymen: President Woodrow Wilson and H.L. Mencken, the Bad Boy of Baltimore. Despite a couple of...

In the autumn of 2005, I moved to New York City, breaking out of the green confines of bucolic and insufferably boring upstate New York to continue college.  I wandered into one of the numerous Russian bookstores on Brighton Beach—a noisy, dirty, and delicious corner of the Soviet Union, preserved on the southernmost tip of...

Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: when the Conservative Political Action Conference moves its annual meeting from Washington, D.C., to Rockford.  Or Dubuque.  Or Peoria.  Or Helena.  Or San Antonio.  Or Bakersfield.  Or Murfreesboro. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. Conservatives flock from around the country to CPAC, expecting to advance...

If there are two vocations more opposite than, on the one hand, the starving but gifted poet, mystery and horror-story writer, and prolific essayist and, on the other, the obscenely rich, ambulance-chasing attorney, this writer does not know them.  Yet these two are conjoined at birth.  To understand this, one must know something about the...

Beach Blanket Bankruptcy would be a great name for a 1960’s-style surf movie about California’s state and local finances.  Alas, although Frankie Avalon still is with us, the beauteous Annette has gone the way of fiscal solvency. Already in recent years, four Golden State cities have declared bankruptcy: Vallejo in 2008, and Stockton, San Bernardino,...

Contrary to the assertion of official historians, April 1865, which saw the fall of the Confederate States of America, was not the month in which the “Union” was saved or a “nation” was forged.  It was the month that saw the transformation of the republic into an oligarchy, and the expansion of government subsidies into...

John Kennedy and Harold Macmillan were the odd couple of the Special Relationship.  Conjuring a picture of them from the cuttings files and obituaries, they seem almost comically mismatched.  For much of the three years that they overlapped in their respective offices, the grouse-shooting British premier appeared ludicrously archaic next to a President who confidently...

My title is not the title the film is known by, but it is, with familiar strangeness, the title that we see, as the credits crawl “the wrong way” (in this film, the right way), imitating the unwinding of the road as seen from a speeding vehicle.  In other words, the plane of the screen...

“Ooh ooh baby, I got a message for you,” Sir Mick Jagger croons, among other endearments, on the most recent Rolling Stones single, the aptly titled “One More Shot.”  The creative muse may have gone south for Jagger and the boys sometime during the first Nixon administration, but the marketing machinery keeps these specimens of...