What should be the posture of a solitary reactionary, who disagrees with every progressive policy promoted by both parties—or at least promoted by the one and resisted feebly by the other? I shall not presume to give advice, but I would invite our attention to an ancient parallel case: The people of Judah in the time of Jeremiah
Feith is typical of the charlatans of this age. Like many American bureaucrats, he has gone through the usual revolving door between public and private, but Feith’s door has also opened on to Tel Aviv. His law-firm, Feith and Zell, which does the predictable lobbying for Israeli interests, allied itself with the Israeli firm Zell and Goldberg, in order to better serve their Israeli clients.
The left breaks out into these fits, it seems to me, when they have been temporarily frustrated in that long march toward moral anarchy and political tyranny that my late friend Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny. Not to worry, as they say. They can be as sure of their victory as Jeremiah was sure of the Babylonian triumph over the faithless people of Judah.
This piece, on the perfidy of the GOP, was published in November of 2004. While no one cares much about George W. Bush and the neoconservative traitors who owned his foreign policy, it may serve as a useful reminder.
President Trump is undoubtedly a creep, but what else can one say of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton? Jack Kennedy and his disgusting brothers? Franklin Roosevelt? Lincoln, whose foul mouth around women, when he was in Congress, caused decent colleagues to shun his company?
Most Americans, hell-bent on success, do not dream of conquering nations or murdering our neighbors. Our vast ambitions are defined by bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger blonds.
In one of Douglas Addams’ very silly books, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the egocentric two-headed president of the universe, is condemned to undergo the ordeal of the Total Perspective Vortex. It is an excruciating form of torture that exposes the criminal to a sense of the infinite size of the universe and his own small place in it. The result is the annihilation of the self. The device was designed by a scientist who got tired of his wife telling him to put things in perspective. The nagging wife might just as well have been Adam Smith or William Godwin or any...
As a college freshman, I made friends with a high school senior who was permitted to live in our dormitory. I never learned how Gary, a Catholic high school student from Chicago, ended up in a college dorm in Charleston. Perhaps I should have asked. Whenever someone did make the mistake of asking Gary what he was doing in Charleston, he invariably answered: “I’m just waiting for a streetcar.” And, if the questioner persisted with the inevitable protest, “But there aren’t any streetcars in Charleston,” Gary responded: “That must be why it’s taking so long.” That is where many of...
Previous If you think any of this argument is overstated, just go to the library and look at the artistic masterpieces of Jacob Epstein and Andy Warhol, and, as you are reading the wit and wisdom of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, explaining the evils of Western culture, listen to some light background music from Ornette Coleman playing “between the notes” on his plastic saxophone. This was all decades ago, in the period that conservatives still celebrate as a high point of our culture, the time when “the Greatest Generation” was still ruling the planet, back before every imaginable ethnic,...
You turn on the radio for the weather report: “Sunny and warm today, with a high near 80. Light breeze out of the South at five miles per hour. Chance of rain less than 10%.” Outside your window, you watch the winds rage and the rains pour. Which are you going to believe, your senses or government-backed science reported in the government-controled media? Coming away from the window, you pick a modern history textbook off the shelf, and you read that modern times are marked by progress. The past was a sewer of racism, sexism, bigotry and ethnic oppression, but...
