The Flight From Winter: The Trip South
I used to laugh at snowbirds who let a little bad weather drive them out of their homes to the dismal housing tracts that have destroyed Florida, but I can no longer take it.
Category: Access
Wednesday’s Child: My Comestible Hat
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” is, famously, the opening sentence of a 1941 essay by Orwell. But Blitz or no Blitz, to our ears the phrase sounds a little hysterical.
Trump Show Trial in the Green Zone
The Trump Show Trial coincided with my finishing Stephen Kotkin’s “Stalin: The Paradoxes of Power.” The monumental book ends with two events: Stalin deciding that Marxist principles dictated finally collectivizing agriculture, which led to 7 million deaths in the Holodomor. And the Shakhty Trial of mine workers, which Uncle Joe – as American liberals lovingly called him – used to shock any objectors to collectivization into submission.
Wednesday’s Child: A Tailbone Mystery
A friend of a friend asked his friend, a medical student, how many bones there are in the human body. In reply he heard that there is no definite answer. “You mean to tell me,” he pressed on in astonishment, “that since the days of the Victorian vivisectionists nobody’s bothered to come up with the answer?”
Ricky Vaughn, Political Prisoner
In 1945, a decorated artillery officer in the Red Army wrote a letter ridiculing “the mustachioed one,” Stalin. He was arrested by the secret police and given a long sentence in the Gulag. That was Solzhenitsyn. Last week Douglass Mackey was arrested for making jokes during the 2016 election. He went under the nom de comedy Ricky Vaughn, after the character played by Charlie Sheen in Major League,”the 1989 baseball spoof. Tyrannies don’t like comedy. Vaughn’s alleged crime was putting up on Twitter suggestions that Hillary Clinton supporters could vote for her by tweeting to a specific number. Only an...
My Presidential Platform, the real #1: Restoring Elections and the Electorate
I pledge to my supporters that I shall do what I can to restore the vision of political order that inspired the drafters of the Constitution.
My Presidential Platform, Plank #1: A Chicken in Every Pot.
The press have been beating down my door and besieging me by telephone and email to find out my positions. My crack team of specialists and eggheads is preparing a package of proposals that I intend, as every good candidate does, to ignore.
The Pros and Cons of Pro-Life by Jerry Salyer
I can’t say how many times I have heard some bishop or diocesan official or other representative of the pro-life movement explain solemnly that being “truly pro-life” means you won’t just be concerned about abortion. No, we also need to be committed to alleviating the plight of migrants, the homeless, Third World babies in need of adoption, those on death row, and for all I know the polar bears.
Wednesday’s Child: Architecture as Confession
The gentle reader may recall that I was once a student at Yale. There, unforgettably, a preternaturally astute classmate named Steve (where is he now, I wonder? In a nuthouse, most likely, along with everybody else who is preternaturally astute) once buttonholed me to deliver a lecture on the architecture of the university, specifically the residential colleges, the Sterling Memorial Library, and other structures of the 1930’s.
