Speaking a different language forces the traveler to wonder how in the world foreigners manage to distort English—and vice versa. In Italy a bar is a place to get coffee and a pastry, have a light lunch, drink a glass of wine, but it is not for serious drinkers and does exclude children.
Growing up, my only training in the martial arts was the experience of getting beaten up by older boys until I learned how to inflict pain even when losing a fight. It was a useful lesson, and just as useful was my intuitive understanding of the basic principle of judo, which (so I have been told) is to use your enemy’s strength against him. I was forced to apply this principle more than once in college, when my athletic friends, invigorated by the joy of youth and a fifth of Jack Daniels, would suddenly realize how pleasant it would be...
A paragraph from an irresponsible rant on the murder of a Saudi journalist. …. It is quite possible that the murder took place exactly as the press, claiming the CIA as the ultimate source, has described it. On the other hand, there is no reason to believe anyone in the media, whether Jim Acosta or Sean Hannity, and after the past few years it is pretty clear we have no reason to believe the FBI, and if the FBI is specializing in political propaganda, can the CIA–the agency that appears to have engaged in massive drug smuggling in order to...
Suppose someone like Mike Pence or Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh were to say–as a transparent comment on the effeminate and race obsessed Barack Obama–that he could not grapple with serious issues because people of his sort are “confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues,” all Hell would break loose. And rightly so, because it is quite wrong to reduce political issues to amateur psychologizing or to find base irrational motives for other people’s arguments. Only children–the word Vladimir Putin used to describe Obama and Ms Clinton–talk this way. But when Obama uses the same words in a transparent...
First, a Digression on What The Greeks Mean To Us The ancient Greeks are among are most significant ancestors or, at least, godfathers. They are one of those mirrors we hold up in order to contemplate our own faces, which we inevitably confuse with theirs. Christians have often read their own darkest impulses into Greek mythology and “idolatry.” (A passing thought: Did St. Paul or St. Jerome really believe educated Greeks worshipped statues made by human hands?) Romantic poets found the dynamic imagination they were trying to cultivate, and since Nietzsche some have found justification for their own chaotic passions...
In the time of Christ and his Apostles, it was enough to accept Christ–that is, the promised Messiah–and Him crucified, but it is a thoroughly human trait to draw conclusions, which are then treated as first principles. In the Golden Age of the American republic, many, perhaps most Americans believed in liberty, both in the sense of political independence and in the sense of moral and social freedom. If a man had a skill by which he could earn money, then–subject to legal, moral and social constraints–he could expect to practice that trade. Then wise guys came long and raised...
Chef Garret Fleming and his dictatorial father talk turkey in time for the holiday.
Allen Wilson bets against gambling in Arkansas, and TJF asks one of life’s ultimate questions.
I am revising a series of articles and lectures I wrote on American Imperialism. In some places I have deleted political references that have lost their significance, in others I have expanded and developed an argument in light of later events and more serious consideration. The first version of this was written in (so far as I can tell) 2002. While the Trump administration may, viewed in retrospect, represent a lull in the imperialists’ Grand Design to wipe the old America from the face of the earth, no President willing to hire John Bolton or Nikki Haley can be regarded as a defender of the American Republic.
Megyn Kelly gets fired for making sense the first time in her career, while Don Lemon is praised for living down to expectations…
