I shall leave the circumstances of my breaking the Orthodox Easter fast shrouded, like a bottle of champagne in a pretentious restaurant, in a starched napkin. Instead, the present post takes up the theme of nostalgia where I left it last week, somewhere among the trees of life.
And must the Senator from Illinois
Be this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?
This brazen gutter idol, reared to power
Upon a leering pyramid of lies?
Biden has a dilemma. He has to win the Democratic primaries, which means winning the “intersectional” struggle. But then in the general election Working Class Joe, as he likes to be called even though now he’s wealthy, has to win back all those working-class Democrats he grew up with in Scranton, Pa. until he was 10, then in Delaware, before being absorbed into the Establishment.
At this point in the argument, I want to make it plain that I am not trying to write even a brief history of political universalism. My basic intent is to show some of the more important influences—influences, I wish to emphasize, that I do not necessarily criticize much less condemn. So far, I have briefly mentioned the Stoic ideal of world-citizenship, which was transformed into a more restrained celebration of the Imperium Romanum as an ideal of human community rooted in justice. The disintegration of the Empire, rather than discrediting the imperial ideal, invested it with spiritual significance. I...
Like all Southern Californians, I’m working on a screenplay. The latest is titled “Che and Cher.” It’s about a fictional meeting in 1965 when Che Guevara divines deep meaning in the new hit “I Got You Babe,” and, avoiding CIA hit teams, sneaks up to Hollywood to meet Cher. Not Sonny. Just kidding. If you are unfortunate enough to live in Southern California, the media are even more saturated with celebrity nonsense than the national media. Along with high taxes, it’s one of the things we have to put up with to enjoy the soporific weather. One of the latest...
Though its trunk appeared to have died some twenty years ago, this year the Oak of Abraham has actually fallen. Beneath the five-thousand-year-old tree, better known as the Oak of Mamre and found on the grounds of the Holy Trinity Monastery in Palestine, is where Abraham invited the three angels to rest, as recounted in Genesis.
Poor Robert de Niro is still the pale-faced teenage punk Bobby Milk, too dumb and too lazy to finish high school or find a job anywhere but in the make-believe world of Hollwyood movies.
News of Sir Roger Scruton’s dismissal has not been overlooked by our eagle-eyed commander-in-chief, though in and of itself the British government’s decision to drop the controversialist – indeed, like the position he was occupying – is not worth the ministerial paper it’s written on. Scruton was there to “advise” architects on how to build buildings that look like something other than the monstrous carbuncle on the face of a beloved friend of Prince’s Charles’ memorable phrase, and yet it is quite clear that this role, more than anything that has actually been built since he took it up, was...
This isn’t about national security. It’s about politics – dirty politics of the dirtiest kind.
Christians ought to be deeply suspicious of both nationalism and globalism, which developed in the course of the 18th century and which were both advocated by the bloody-handed leaders of the French Revolution who killed each other over whether the Revolution represented the revival of the French nation or the dawning of the brotherhood of man. In the end, the nationalists won, and while Napoleon pretended to be liberating the captive nations of the Holy Roman Empire, he was really only replacing Austria with France, Hapsburgs with Bonapartes. Stalin and Trotsky played out the same homicidal farce in their struggle...
