Ruling elites, which historically collect 10-15% in duties and fees, now confiscate 50% or more of the income of hardworking men and women, robbing them of their time and their power over their lives.
Like so many modern American males, the Marquis de Sade was incapable of taking pleasure in the ordinary things of life. Morally and intellectually feeble, he wallowed in fantasies of sexual violence. The history of civilization might be written as a series of social inventions for the proper application of violence: boxing matches, duels, warfare. When civilizations die, men cannot fall back on the killer instincts of barbarians who control their violence. They are like the jackdaws studied by Konrad Lorenz: Not genetically programmed to fight and kill, they do not have the ritual off-switch to stop violence, once it...
CSPAN coverage of the House of Representatives may soon replace Comedy Central. Within a short 24 hour period, House Democrats proposed giving the vote to illegal aliens and refused to condemn outrageous statements made by Somali Muslim Ilhan Omar. Born in Mogadishu, where she spent her early years, Omar and her family were granted refugee status by an American government whose kindness exceeded its wisdom. Omar was brought up in the most ridiculous state of the American Union—Minnesota—where she eventually became a policy fellow at the Hubert Humphrey School of extraterrestrial Marxism, “community nutrition educator” at the state’s parody-university,...
Big John Canaday may not have had brains, but with or without a gun he had grit, and to this day I do not know why he befriended me, much less why he picked the least athletic person he knew to take Coach Butts out to dinner. It may have been something as simple as the fact that my father owned a sports team, or–as I should prefer to think–that he knew I was at ease with grown-up men. Another bar (The Keg) in Charleston was owned by a Jewish prize-fighter who did not want kids in what was more...
My old man did not think much of writers; he had known too many of them. He did not like what little he had seen of Hemingway and regarded his obsession with virility as unmanly. He used to say, of a certain type of tuft-hunting spongers that they were the sort who called Hemingway “Papa.” Hemingway, at least as a younger man, must have had few illusions about himself and his generation, and his first and best novel, The Sun Also Rises is an American’s Good-bye to All That, to manhood as well as civilization. In the novel poor Jake...
The wealth of information and the power of prejudice would make it more difficult, though hardly impossible, to trace the degeneration of the United States from the limited republic of Adams and Jefferson to the imperial plutocracy of Lincoln and Grant to the national socialism of Franklin Roosevelt and his successors to our own miserable and degraded condition today, when conservatives have abandoned even the fig leaves of law that used to protect us, in theory at least, from our rulers in Washington. Is there a single moral, social, economic, constitutional, or even environmental principle that would deter people like….Feel...
The problem with Warren—and with so many other celebrity racists—is not what they say or do but what they take for granted. That poor white female who became an NAACP leader wanted desperately to be Black just as much as Warren wanted to be Indian. Why?
When people vote their pocketbooks, as they often do, they are giving some color to Marx’s more down-to-earth definition of ideology as a set of ideas concocted to advance the interests of a social class. The creed of classical liberalism—low taxes, free trade, individual liberty–is the ideology of the well-to-do bourgeoisie, while socialism is the ideology of those who expect to be dependent upon government largesse: schoolteachers, promiscuous young women, and the politicians and public servants, who have so nobly given up brilliant careers in the private sector because they wished to serve the people. No one claims the ideal...
What the GOP needs, “Conservatives” tell us, is a sharper ideological focus that will give greater prominence to the vast reservoir of “Conservative” “ideas.” If only the “Conservatives” were simply joking, if only they were entirely cynical about the war of words between the two parties, one might have some hope for a restoration of political sanity in this poor country.
TJF: I’ve mentioned to you my Uncle Dan who once lived in New Orleans and was a leading expert on port facilities. You’ve been to New Orleans and have spent time in Louisiana. On the one hand, no two places could be more different than Northern Wisconsin and Southern Louisiana. On the other hand, your Southern experiences seem to have been fruitful. . . AVB: I’ve set stories in Superior and Natchitoches, Louisiana, where my wife and I lived when I taught at Northwestern State. One Superior-Natchitoches story appeared in the South Carolina Review, one in New Orleans Review. The...
