Though I’ve been his loyal customer for the better part of a decade, our butcher regards me with suspicion. I see it in his eyes, as he looks away in the general direction of pork loin. They remind me of the eyes of a local pharmacist, in my adolescence in Moscow, from whom I used to buy potassium permanganate by the gross.
We are fortunate in having the poems of Theognis, a Megarian conservative aristocrat who lived through this period and sighed for the good old days.
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...
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...
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...
“I hate the working class,” my godfather, an artist who painted dream landscapes and equally apolitical still lifes, liked to say between sips of lukewarm tea, I fear only half in jest. I thought of him the other day, when a neighbor’s ancient water main – expanding from violent summer heat, or else dislodged by one of the minor earthquakes we get every so often in Palermo – leaked into my ceiling and I rushed out in search of somebody who could stop the flooding. I don’t know, perhaps Switzerland, Holland, or some other kind of Germany is an exception,...
Although he’s back on Twitter as of this writing, recently the tech giant locked gun scholar John Lott out of his account. He’s been the main source for my writing on guns and politics for two decades. And when it came out I reviewed his main book, “More Guns, Less Crime” – great title – as well as one of his other books. Lott’s “crime”? He actually read the New Zealand mass killer’s “manifesto” and quoted its socialist and environmentalist sections. That violated New Zealand’s policy of banning all discussion of the killings. But since when do New Zealand’s policies...
I have never hidden my impecuniousness from the gentle reader, indeed I have flaunted it on occasion. And I do so again now, because otherwise the image I’m about to conjure up – with me on the deck of a large yacht, champagne glass in hand, exchanging pleasant inconsequentialities with the other guests – would reflect badly on the reputation of Wednesday’s Child. This kind of story only makes sense if the narrator is poorer than the proverbial church mouse, and yes, I qualify. I’m as poor as Browning’s “ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned,” if you remember...
Chris Cuomo has finally succeeded in attracting public attention. Cuomo was with his family in a bar on Shelter Island, New York, when a Dittohead stranger approached him and made the mistake of calling him “Fredo”—a not very imaginative nickname coined, apparently, by Rush Limbaugh. Cuomo exploded
I don’t own a TV. But during the last week I occasionally have been watching the TV news, which has been dominated by the killings in El Paso and Dayton. FoxNews has been defensive; even Tucker Carlson, by far the best host. CNN, which is nothing but lies. As Tucker said, CNN and other networks – as well as the NY Times, WaPo, etc. – replaced the Russia Hoax with the Racism Hoax. Although I haven’t watched it continuously, which would have landed me in nearby Hoag Hospital’s psych unit, from what I could tell CNN never mentioned the Dayton...
