What we have here—not even the President has had the effrontery to deny it—is an intellectual recession. I cannot think of a year in which more; bad books received more serious attention. These weren’t just lapses but a pattern, and one need not be paranoid to look for explanations. What people do is, mostly, what...
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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,...
Do We Want a Federal Police Force?
Probably the last thing that would have occurred to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer on his way to meet “Kristen” in Room 870 of D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel was that both he and the Emperor’s Club VIP were under FBI surveillance for federal crimes—prostitution and a financial crime called “structuring.” Traditionally, the enforcement of criminal law...
The Latest Dope From Washington
“Tarry not, I pray you, Madam,” Walter Raleigh is supposed to have cautioned Queen Elizabeth, “for the wings of time are tipped with the feathers of death.” As Harold Macmillan observed a few years ago: “Civil servants don’t write memos like that anymore.” Some have trouble just speaking the language. Nicholas Burns, the State Department...
Signed Into Law
National Education Day was signed into law by President Bush and Congress last March 20. At first sight this new holiday looks like the President’s bid to be taken seriously as the “education President.” In fact, educators nationwide celebrated it as a tribute to their profession. But a closer look at the bill indicates that...
Vocation
Calvary Produced by Reprisal Films and The Irish Film Board Directed and written by John Michael McDonagh Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures In his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce has the father of his protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, bitterly complain of the Irish people, “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden...
Swan Song
“Did you hear what happened to the swan?” Tucked away in the residential area along suburban Philadelphia’s main line lies the idyllic campus of Eastern College. For the last four years this Christian academic institution has sponsored the Evangelical Roundtable: an attempt to find definition in the ideologically shattered realms of Evangelical-land. “The Roundtable,” says...
An American Dilemma
In 1976, the Episcopal Church, U.S.A., met in General Convention to consider, among other things, two questions: the adoption of a new Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of women. Whether they knew it or not, the delegates were actually resolving a deeper, more disturbing dilemma: whether to remain orthodox or to remain respectable....
Travel Ban, and Beyond
The Supreme Court decided on June 26 to allow key parts of the Trump administration’s “travel ban” to go into effect temporarily. This was an unexpected victory for the President—and for common sense. Until the Court hears the full case in October, the administration will be able to bar travelers from six majority-Muslim countries who...
College Admissions and Other Rites of Fragility
Think of the angst the recent college admissions scandal has caused in wealthy households from Greenwich to La Jolla, and nowhere in between, except maybe Winnetka. After speaking with friends navigating the modern-day rite of passage that applying to college has become, I imagine dinnertime conversations like this: “Sequoia? Sequoia, can you put down your...
The Age of Reason and the Age of Fear
There are uncanny similarities between the 18th and the 21st centuries. The whole concept of liberty, equality and fraternity in the last two decades of the 18th century was as much based on a lie as it is in the first two decades of the 21st.
Does Anyone Feel a Draft?
I grew up in the Volunteer State of Tennessee, so called because of its citizens’ enthusiastic response to the First Mexican War. Maybe growing up there colors my view that wars ought to be fought by folks who want to fight them-and it certainly in creases my estimate of the number of young men who...
Battier and Battier
An extra moody, extra dark new installment of The Batman franchise asks its audience to believe the world would be a better place if the have-nots took by force from the haves in order to make a more equitable society.
Recessional
If drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” address was a remarkable performance in many ways: It simultaneously marked the zenith of American triumphalism and the nadir, not only...
Prince MbS: A Good Mohammedan
It is the duty of every Muslim to emulate the example of his prophet as recorded in the Hadith. By ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Prince Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has only acted in accordance with that orthodox, 14-century-old principle. It would have been eminently un-Islamic, in fact, for “MbS” to...
Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Madame Bovary Produced by A Company Filmproduktions gesellschaft Screenplay by Felipe Marino and Sophie Barthes from Gustave Flaubert’s novel Directed by Sophie Barthes Distributed by Alchemy and Millennium Entertainment Gustave Flaubert was the satirist of dissatisfaction. His principal theme was the ruinous nature of unrealizable dreams, a malady he treated with cold contempt in his 1857 novel...
Recycling Refuse
What do Groucho Marx, Lech Walesa, Oriana Fallaci, Johnny Carson, Ted Patrick, G. Gordon Liddy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Fonda, his daughter Jane and son-in-law Tom Hayden, Ed Koch, Roman Polanski, Robert Redford, Salvador Dali, William Shockley, Robert Garwood, Ayn Rand, Ian Fleming, Roane Arledge, Robert Shelton, Alex Haley, Henry Miller, Arnold Toynbee, and William F....
My Kavanaugh Hearing Nightmare and ‘Oprah Moment’ on Fox
One thing I learned from my ordeal in the limelight of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations is that the truth is always more complicated than the narrative.
Bring Me a Grape
What a peculiar, in some respects downright weird little world this fascinating biography introduces us to. Imagine a very clever, very plain, very spoiled little boy, born at the turn of the century into the intensely competitive upper-middle or lower-aristocratic class in Britain. Conventional success at sports, diplomacy, the professions, or business being ruled out...
Science, Wisdom, and Moral Judgment
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Juvenal’s admonition to husbands has often been applied to government, but rarely with the full force of the original: “Go ahead and lock her up,” the Roman satirist warned, “but who will watch the watchmen themselves? She’s put on her guard and starts with them.” Once a large number of frail...
Liberal Slander
At events such as the Episcopal Church’s General Convention, held last July in Denver, traditional believers get slandered in all sorts of ways, most of them indirect but effective. (And the most energetic apostles of inclusivity, dialogue, and openness never, ever call the slanderers to account.) Issues, a daily one-page sheet of commentary, provided several...
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...
What We Are Reading: December 2021
Milk cartons carry expiration dates. But, for obvious reasons, they don’t need them. History books don’t carry expiration dates. But, for less obvious reasons, they do need them. History books expire when archival discoveries supplant earlier narratives or when new interpretive theories emerge. Lucky for historical posterity, decades more will have to pass before Matt...
An Epic Bogosity
Edmund Spenser (1554-99) decided while still a student to make himself into the great English poet on the model of Vergil. So he began his publishing career with a set of 12 pastorals, and planned an enormous 24-book allegorical romance-epic, The Faerie Queene, to glorify Elizabeth I and her Britain as Vergil had glorified Rome...
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...
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....
Constitutional Convention Would Open Pandora’s Box
Despite the increasing volume on both the right and the left of calls for a constitutional convention, the solution to our problems is not to change the Constitution or even throw it out, but to obey it.
A Mind of the South
February 10 was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Mind of the South, WJ. Cash’s classic and, in the event, only book. Reading Cash was a formative experience for most members of the symposium-going class of Southerners, so there will be a number of gatherings to mark the occasion. As a matter of...
The New Environmentalism
More change has occurred in the environmental movement during the past ten years than in its entire previous history. Its thrust has become less ideological and more pragmatic, less New Age and more scientific. It is increasingly grounded in the databases of atmospheric science and the genetic models of conservation biology. The practice of conservation...
There’s No Place Like Home
Every school has a playground for its pupils; English schools provide a playground for politicians, too. Children seek security, regularity, and continuity: The games they play in the schoolyard observe rules that do not change. Change, though, is the contemporary politician’s reason for existence: He seeks not to hold fast to that which is good...
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
The road to hell, I was taught as a child, is paved with good intentions. Surely no one could fault the intentions of the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy—Martin Luther King’s right arm and successor in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—as revealed in this fascinating and moving autobiography. Inspired by faith in Divine mercy, by a...
Alien Maestro
If you ask historically literate lovers of classical music to identify the leading conductors from the 20th century’s early decades, they will supply a profusion of names: Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Willem Mengelberg, Otto Klemperer, Artur Nikisch, Leopold Stokowski, Fritz Busch, Erich Kleiber, Bruno Walter, Felix Weingartner, Serge Koussevitzky, Pierre Monteux, and Sir Thomas Beecham, for...
The Ponderous and the Fleet
A review of Watchmen (produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures; directed by Zack Snyder; screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse) and Duplicity (produced and distributed by Universal Pictures; directed and written by Tony Gilroy) The title of Alan Moore’s 1986 comic-book series Watchmen alludes to the Roman satirist Juvenal, who asked, “Who watches...
Abortion Delusion
Planned Parenthood Dominatrix Cecile Richards sat defiantly before a congressional panel on September 29, making little effort to conceal her disgust at the perfunctory speeches made in front of her. She exuded a fierce confidence that dwarfed the resolve of her Republican opponents, presaging the House’s passage the very next day of a gutted stopgap...
The Enduring Face of the Fake Right
It is hard to understand the continued presence of Jonah Goldberg as a conservative icon. Goldberg has the right to criticize Trump, yet he has turned himself into a nonstop Trump-hating machine, who manages to condemn anyone who still defends the president as a lunatic or criminal. Nietzsche once said mischievously that a good war...
Are Conservatives Fair Game?
Should members of the political right criticize one another for their faults, or band together out of solidarity against the left? Is it fair to consider a conservative public figure’s personal life when judging his moral pronouncements? I attempt to answer these questions in response to a critic.