Category: Access

9

Wednesday’s Child:  Oral Equivalence

Entertained or amused as I was by readers’ responses to last week’s post, I could not suppress the feeling that we were speaking different languages, all mischievously masked as Standard English.  Nomenclature gives way like an old shirt when cultural differences pull on it from behind, and nowhere is the horrible ripping sound more audible than in discussions revolving around food. If you are explaining something about Hollywood to an Englishman, it makes no sense to compare it with Pinewood Studios, even though, purely functionally, this is its British counterpart in the industry; better to compare it to the BBC,...

32

Wednesday’s Child: Health and Poverty

I have known many rich people in my lifetime and had ample occasion to remark upon what seemed like an endless spiral of personal tragedies they invariably suffered.  As a Christian, I always found this unfair.  The rich are supposed to be thoughtless of God and careless of the salvation of their souls – with eternal anguish their likely posthumous lot – but here on earth their existence is meant to be cushy, replicating or evoking the serenity of paradise. Instead it looked like their future suffering unto eternity was merely a continuation of their present sorrows in this earthly...

18

…Who Help Themselves

This piece appeared in the first number of revamped Chronicles, in  May 1985.  Some readers found it alarming at the time.   It now seems quite moderate, though many law-and-order neoconservatives would still deplore the call for self-help.   We take too much for granted in America. Whenever we have a problem, we assume that somebody else is paid to solve it, somebody from the government. All the ancient burdens of the human flesh—poverty and envy, greed and arrogance—have been turned over to one or another bureaucratic agency.  We sleep better at night knowing that somewhere someone is busy making life...

1

9/11 Still Haunts 2016 Presidential Race

Without delving into “conspiracy theories,” the 15th anniversaries of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, continue to haunt America and the world, especially the 2016 election. 1. Hillary Clinton, currently running for president herself, was “co-president” for the eight-year run-up to the attacks. She’s running on her long experience in government. But the first (and one hopes only) Clinton administration left the country open to the attacks. For one, its open-borders immigration policy let in the 19 terrorists. For another, its obsession with bombing numerous foreign countries – Iraq, Serbia, Sudan – for no real reason except to keep...

11

Trump: The Lesser Evil

  Hillary Clinton’s take on a large percentage of the American people is drawing fire: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right, The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it,” and added, “some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.” The other half of Trump supporters are simply stupid and depressed, and people in Hillaryland should pity them. Let’s do some quick and very rough math.  In round numbers, the country has about 280 million people, about three fourths of whom—or 210 million—are old enough to vote. ...

3

Tripe Advisor

The generosity of a friend, like a magic carpet, took me to Rome over the weekend, and I am glad to report that the best restaurant in the world is still there and still serves the best tripe.  Outside Italy, mastery over tripe is a useless yardstick of a chef’s eminence, since hardly anybody makes it, while a cook in England would probably get arrested if he dared to put the dish on the menu, containing as it does organic agents even more devastating to the human condition than gluten or traces of nuts.  On our blessed peninsula, however, tripe...

2

Wednesday’s Child: The Bloodthirsty Artist

Everybody knows, however vaguely, that just before World War I, during his years in Vienna, Adolf Hitler made his living as a painter.  In Mein Kampf he recalled his hopes of attaining at least national renown, holding the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts responsible for eventually dashing them by denying him admission.  It is likewise remembered that the Viennese cafes where the epoch’s leading artists habitually gathered were frequented by the future dictator with a view to what today would be called networking.  In 1937, pictures by some of those artists were famously held up to ridicule in the Exhibition...

4

Writing and Reading Verse, Part IV

Despite the timidity of readers afraid to expose their versifying to scrutiny, I shall write one or two more posts in the hope of seeing some small light dawn in the distance. Before leaving blank verse—which, as I said earlier, was easy to write poorly but hard to write well—let us look at one or two more specimens of how it can be done effectively.  Here is Milton’s description of Satan in Hell: He trusted to have equal’d the most High, If he oppos’d; and with ambitious aim Against the Throne and Monarchy of God Rais’d impious War in Heav’n...

18

Wednesday’s Child: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Some six months ago, at the end of March, I wrote here about the sensational case of the Ukrainian Joan of Arc, Nadezhda Savchenko – then in captivity in Moscow and undergoing a farce of a trial – who has since been exchanged for some Russian prisoners of the undeclared war and is now in Kiev.  Now, it may be that Savchenko is not the Ukrainian Joan of Arc, and that in reality she’s a war criminal, a madwoman, a villainess, a CIA agent, or even a Russian police provocateur; none of that matters in the least for making sense...

0

Trump’s Strategy for Victory

  We’ve all come to know Donald Trump, or some version of him: real estate baron, reality TV star, target of biased leftist media, husband of three wives and father of four children, victor over 16 Republican rivals in the “bum of the week” primaries and supposedly guaranteed loser to the first female Supreme Leader come this Nov. 8. The odds are against him: The media assault is as relentless from neo“conservative” pundits eager to slaughter thousands more U.S. troops and millions more foreigners, in uniform and out. The country’s changing demographics increased those likely to vote against him while...