Category: Access

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Sicilian Trogs, Preface: Conclusion. Arrivederci, Roma

We had decided to stay in a little hotel in the center, the place in which we had spent a week during our first trip to Italy, 30 years ago.  I had been foolishly attracted to the Alberto Cesàri, when I discovered that Stendahl had passed a good part of his sojourn in Rome in this very place.  It was and is an unpretentious place, though about five years ago they added a rooftop bar and breakfast room.  In 1988 most of the guests were tourists like us, but this time we were the only Americans, except for a Fox...

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Not Christmas Yet by David Wihowski

By

Not Christmas Yet. Avoiding the incessant vocal vandalism done to traditional Christmas carols and holiday chestnuts is all but impossible if you go anywhere in the American marketplace between now and January 1. Unfortunately having one’s ears stuffed with cotton is not particularly polite when in public. While I love good Christmas music, and there is a wealth of fine music for that holiday, the season of Advent is all but ignored by all but a few. In a sort of personal resistance to the American obsession with the holiday spirit, prior to the holiday, I listen only to Advent...

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Sicilian Trogs, I: Preface

Speaking a different language forces the traveler to wonder how in the world foreigners manage to distort English—and vice versa.  In Italy a bar is a place to get coffee and a pastry, have a light lunch, drink a glass of wine, but it is not for serious drinkers and does exclude children. 

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Tom Farr, Jesse Helms and Abortion

I knew Tom Farr when we were undergraduates at Hillsdale College in the mid-1970s, then young conservatives in Washington in the mid-1980s. He is a fine man without a prejudiced bone in his body. It’s so unfair he’s being publicly trashed for being a “racist” after he was appointed to be a district judge in the Eastern District of North Carolina and received the highest recommendation from the American Bar Association.

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Wednesday’s Child: A State of No Conscience

“In an instant I had my lifelong foe by the throat. After so many years of waiting and longing, he was mine at last. I tore him to shreds and fragments. I rent the fragments to bits. I cast the bleeding rubbish into the fire, and drew into my nostrils the grateful incense of my burnt-offering.  At last, and forever, my Conscience was dead!  I was a free man!  I turned upon my poor aunt, who was almost petrified with terror, and shouted: ‘Out of this house with your paupers, your charities, your reforms, your pestilent morals! You behold before...

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The Paul Ehrlich Half-Century

People like to give names to periods. During the span from 1968 to 2018, numerous events happened: the end of the Cold War, the rise of the computers and so on. But one thing now stands out: demographic collapse in almost every country. So I’m calling it the Paul Ehrlich Half-Century because 1968 was the year his book “The Population Bomb” was published by the Sierra Club and Ballantine Books, whose publicists had a flair for marketing.  The paperbook version included a lit bomb on the cover, along with the subheadings: “Population Control or Race to Oblivion?” And, in shouting...

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Wednesday’s Child: Easy Listening

Another impression I took home after that fortnight in London was of being trapped in an elevator of the 1980’s.  This is really a new thing in the city most people associate with reserve, politeness, and tranquility, that one is everywhere and at all hours surrounded with “music.”  Needless to say, it’s not music at all, but a cousin of what during my American years I heard played in elevators, shopping malls, and offices of the more vicious kind of dentist. I read recently that the American original was called Muzak because its inventor had been so taken with Kodak...

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New From the Forum

A paragraph from an irresponsible rant on the murder of a Saudi journalist. …. It is quite possible that the murder took place exactly as the press, claiming the CIA as the ultimate source, has described it.  On the other hand, there is no reason to believe anyone in the media, whether Jim Acosta or Sean Hannity,  and after the past few years it is pretty clear we have no reason to believe the FBI, and if the FBI is specializing in political propaganda, can the CIA–the agency that appears to have engaged in massive drug smuggling in order to...

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Wednesday’s Child: A London Postscript

 While I was in London, an old friend of mine and I had what can be described as an emotional misunderstanding, and since then I’ve thought of little else. Particularly in view of the fact that had it not been for this friend’s nearly infinite kindness to me over the years, I probably wouldn’t be here now writing about it, or about anything else for that matter. So I could do worse, I figured, than to extrapolate the misunderstanding and extract a moral out of its reflective depths. The moral is that modern civilization has compromised sentiment. In about the...

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The Early Church: Heretics and Puritans

In the time of Christ and his Apostles, it was enough to accept Christ–that is, the promised Messiah–and Him crucified, but it is a thoroughly human trait to draw conclusions, which are then treated as first principles.  In the Golden Age of the American republic, many, perhaps most Americans believed in liberty, both in the sense of political independence and in the sense of moral and social freedom.  If a man had a skill by which he could earn money, then–subject to legal, moral and social constraints–he could expect to practice that trade.  Then wise guys came long and raised...