In the second book of the Politics, Aristotle takes up, classifies, and analyzes the variety of political systems, both real and theoretical. His initial point of departure is sharing or having in common (koinonein): Do the citizens of a commonwealth have all things, some things, or no things in common?
Funny thing, déjà vu. However trifling the original experience that triggers it years later, no sooner is it relived in the present than it acquires mystical significance. I had a brush with it over the weekend, when some Russian friends flew us over to Spain to stay with them for a few days at their house by the sea. This was a couple of hours’ drive from Valencia, on the Iberian Peninsula’s eastern coast. Driving from the airport through small seaside towns and villages, suddenly I noticed with horror that half the shop signs were in Russian. Family restaurants, hair...
“There ain’t no draft no more.” – Sgt. Hukla in “Stripes” Say, isn’t the U.S. House of Representatives supposed to be controlled by Republican “conservatives,” almost all of whom oppose the non-conservative Donald Trump? Weren’t they elected to a majority in the 2010 Tea Party campaign to repeal Obamacare? Well, the conservatives just voted to impose the draft on girls. H.R. 4478 actually is called the Draft America’s Daughters Act of 2016. Reportedly it was put up as a jest by “Rep. Duncan Hunter, a former Marine who served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, [but] does not...
Vladimir Bukovsky, whom I became friends with while living in Cambridge in the late 80’s, was born in 1942. In 1963, while a student in Moscow, he was arrested and charged with possession of forbidden literature. As it was thought more convenient to pronounce a lad of 20 insane than to bother with a trial, he was committed to a special psychiatric hospital. He was released in February 1965 and arrested again in December of that year for organizing a street demonstration. This time he was committed to a psychiatric hospital of the ordinary type. Released in July 1966, in...
This a revision of three old pieces on the same subject: Thucydides observed, in his famous depiction of the civil war on Corfu, that political partisans change the meanings of words. Dictionaries have become instruments of ideological oppression. The movement began long before the end of the millennium. “We very clearly had made a mistake,” said the marketing director of Merriam-Webster, explaining her company’s decision to pull an on-line thesaurus that included “faggot” and “fruit” as synonymns for “homosexual.” While many homophiles freely use expressions like “faggot” and “fruity,” and “butch,” they reserve the right to dictate polite usage...
First is a sonnet by Tennyson, not one of his best, perhaps, but indicating his distaste for professional critics and men of letters: Poets and Their Bibliographies Old poets foster’d under friendlier skies, Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say, At dawn, and lavish all the golden day To make them wealthier in the readers’ eyes; And you, old popular Horace, you the wise Adviser of the nine-years-ponder’d lay, And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay, Catullus, whose dead songster never dies; If, glancing downward on the kindly sphere That once had roll’d you round and round...
I didn’t know Neocons had friends. I thought they only had interests. But both Peter Wehner in the NY Times and Tom Nichols at The Federalist whine they have “lost friends” over opposing Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. Well, some friends of mine in 2006 “lost” their son in the Iraq War, which these two chickenhawks supported, Wehner even as the head of Bush’s Office of Strategic Initiatives. I went to the funeral. And another former neighbor of mine got a 100% disability in Iraq. It’d say each is a bigger “loss” than somebody de-Friending you on Facebook. One of the...
Every one of us knows something about lying – not that I’d ever dream of casting aspersions on the probity of my readers–and it isn’t always from books that the bitter knowledge comes. And the one thing about lying that any normal person who’s ever been caught with his hand in the cookie jar understands is that the lie has to be convincing, otherwise it would be best to simply say nothing and look injured, leaving it to others to make the necessary excuses. A convincing lie, in fact, needs to surpass the truth in verisimilitude, because a salient feature...
Machiavelli was not a philosopher in the pure sense of the world, but a Florentine writer and statesman who loved Florence and Italy and thought hard about the ways they could be made independent, free, and republican. Aristotle, by contrast, was interested in the nature of politics or ta politika, the things pertaining to the polis.
Children, generally speaking, are not wiser than their parents, and it cannot ever be said that pupils are much cleverer than teachers, but it is a manifest truth that newspaper editors are always stupider than newspaper readers. In fact, reading a newspaper invariably conjures up in my mind the image of a large department store where the customers, who are ordinary people possessed of the usual medley of human qualities, are served by moronic salesgirls, automatons with the dual setting of surly or flirty. In England I read the Daily Mail, of which there is no longer an equivalent in...
