On the horror of bad restauration. “The leader of all the devilry is of course the United States, which is clocked at an average of one hour and one minute. In short, in this whole sad sublunary world, only in France, Italy, Greece, and Spain do people spend more than two hours a day in prandial concourse.”
The aspiring Aztec visits his office, where all is not well, and makes up his mind to consult the Paramoral Investigator, who turns out to be weirder and more offensive than he had imagined.
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.
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...
In which our hero discovers that not all dreams reveal the truth. We visit the home of the improbably named Shawn Borowski, who is beginning to imagine that he is a noble Aztec, whose world has been destroyed by people who look like him.
It seems hardly possible, but the Democratic Party is lurching even further to the Left. At this rate, they’ll soon advocate kidnapping missionaries to feed them to cannibals. (I hope I’m not offending a key interest group there.) California is the epicenter of Dem Party doctrines and cash. Silicon Valley Leftist oligarchs now form the money foundation for Dem candidates across the country. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is salivating at the prospect of again becoming House Speaker. Yet even she still isn’t Left enough for many in the party. The Sacramento Bee’s story after last weekend’s California Dem confab in...
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,...
TJF: What do you think of arming teachers? What qualifications would you impose? What other approaches might be taken, apart from saving the family and destroying consolidated schools. Finally, what went wrong with the sheriff’s deputies? Should Sheriff Israel be forced to resign? It’s unfortunate that it has come to arming teachers, but I suppose that before we can remake our society I think that certain qualified personnel on school grounds be permitted concealed carry. Probably most of the faculty, administrators, and staff wouldn’t want to do so, and that’s fine because if only a few were armed, rigorously trained, and...
North Against South, written by the venerable Dr. Ludwell Johnson of William and Mary, is a concise history of “the War” and Reconstruction. It is a unique work of enduring value. The most recent edition, published in 2002, contains several valuable prefaces. Johnson writes there that the nationalist myth of the War commonly simplifies the conflict, condemns the Southern section, and transforms a complex tale into a morality play. Reflecting on his own early education in Richmond, Virginia, Johnson notes that this myth left him dissatisfied, and early planted in him a desire to know the story of his own...
