Category: Access

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Crescent City: Colors and Complexions by Joshua Doggrell

In 21st-Century America, there are precious few mediums through which the issue of race can be addressed with even a modicum of rationality.  One of the few means still available is the thorough, well-researched work produced by historians. Perhaps the only reason this avenue is still available to us at all is because those whom you would expect to participate in protests over its content do not usually spend the required time for reading books or truly studying history. 

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Wednesday’s Child: A Leningrad Mozart

Whenever I happen to see archival footage, which is usually in biopics, of twentieth-century musical titans, composers like Rachmaninov or Britten, I have the irrepressible sensation that actually these people belong in the nineteenth century and that their moving and speaking presence in the twenty-first is a clever trick, something like the tricolor celluloid screen my grandmother attached to the giant water-filled lens in front of her black-and-white Soviet-made TV to create the illusion of it being a modern color set.  The translucent screen made the top, where the sky might be in a film, seem blue, the bottom was...

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Poem, An Unsweet Nothing from the Earl of Rochester

Rochester was a Restoration rake, suicidal in his excesses, and excessive in his cynicism.  Much of his thought consists of the fag-ends of the French literature he picked up during the nightmare years of the regicidal commonwealth.  His deathbed conversion has done little to improve his general reputation, but I am tempted to compare him with other poets of despairing disbelief, Baudelaire and Lou Reed.  John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, might have said of himself, one of Lou Reed’s lines: “Some kinds of love are mistaken for vision.”  Please don’t go looking for the source of the line, because decent people should be offended.

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The Courts and the Election

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Alexander Hamilton called the Supreme Court “the least dangerous branch” in Federalist 78. They key was Marbury v. Madison, which Alexander Bickel and others showed was based on dubious jurisprudence. But that case gave the court almost unlimited power to change the Constitution. A lawyer friend of mine told me his constitutional law professor taught the budding young Clarence Darrows, “The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is.” And in almost every case, the court follows what the Establishment Elite tell it to do. Joe Sobran used to point out how...

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Cicero and Shakespeare Sets Now Available

While I still hope to pen some reflections on this past summer’s Shakespeare Symposium, today’s post is purely practical in nature: announcing the sale of the complete set of those talks which many of you had the pleasure of hearing in person this year, but also the Cicero set of 2018. Charter Members have access to all of these recordings (Cicero here and Shakespeare here) as part of their membership, but everyone else has to pay, though the prices we are offering are quite reasonable! Each Cicero lecture is available for $6 each, or you can get all 11 for...

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Tulsi, Wang, Comey and the Rancid Ruling Elite

I call it the Rancid Ruling Elite because its main goal now is to destroy what’s left of Christian Civilization. Other names for it are the Deep State, the Establishment, Ike’s Military-Industrial Complex or, from the 60s, The System. Let’s look at some of the RRE’s recent actions. By far the best Democratic candidate for president is Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. Yet the RRE froze her out of the next debate, meaning her unique voice on foreign policy won’t get heard. Shouldn’t voters hear what she thinks about the possible deal Trump is working out with the Taliban to finally, after...

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Wednesday’s Child: The Philosopher’s Fruit

It’s that time of year again.  The doldrums of August is when the fig season is at its peak, and nobody from Syracuse to Cagliari wants to talk about anything but figs or to do anything other than consume them. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” as the poet said.  The sonnet, as the gentle reader may remember, is a melancholy, nostalgic dirge, just the kind of bagatelle one imagines Wednesday’s Child whistling as he pours himself a glass of Hine’s Rare & Delicate.  But in fact, few things on earth are mightier antidotes to grumpy nostalgia...

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Top Unconscious Election Issue Dates to 1949

Although I can’t prove it, I think an unconscious element in every presidential election is the fear a candidate might get us into a nuclear war. In my long career of voting for president, beginning with Ford/Carter in 1976, I certainly had a “gut loathing” of only two candidates I thought would be unstable and liable to lunge for the Nuclear Football and press the Button: John McCain, a Republican, in 2008, and Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, in 2016. I think a lot of voters shared that fear. There’s even a 1999 book, “The Gift of Fear and Other Survival...