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...
Donald Trump’s easy victory in his home state of New York rockets him into the next phase of his campaign: The long march taken by the Okies to California. Albeit in a custom-built 747. Some pundits have criticized Trump for not having a “ground game” and not “knowing the rules” of the nominating process, especially in Colorado. But the process was rigged from the beginning against somebody like him – somebody like Ron Paul, whose 2008 campaign sparked GOP convention rules that prevented his name being put in nomination at the 2012 convention. If the rules are rigged, why play...
Although the Aristotelian system, qua system, probably does offer a better intellectual framework than the alternatives, it is his approach to human questions that is so invaluable.
A physiognomic peculiarity of Viktor Zolotov, who until last week and for the past 13 years had been head of Russia’s presidential bodyguard, is that he is a Doppelgänger of the man he was charged with protecting from enemies foreign and domestic. Dogs sometimes grow to look like their owners, and evidently this applies not only to old ladies’ poodles, but to guard dogs as well. The German word I’m using, incidentally, meaning a body double, is not so much pretentiousness on my part as consciousness of an historical rhyme. If Zolotov is a Putin clone, what used to be...
This was my swan song, published last June (2015) George Garret used to tell the story of a young writer who visited him in York Harbor, Maine, The writer, who had worked in a prison, wore a cap emblazoned with the letters SCUP, which stood for something like South Carolina Union of Prisons. Sharing some of George’s sense of humor–which bordered on the wicked–he went through the streets of the resort town and stopped ill-dressed vacationers and said in his most polite Southern manner, “Excuse me, sir, but I am with the South Carolina Ugly Patrol, and it is my...
Sessions, not Ryan, Would be the Sensible Pick of a Brokered Convention I have long believed that there is a global power elite that manipulates the political process to its advantage. This strikes me as a “no duh” assertion. What separates me from some of my more conspiratorial brethren, is that I don’t believe this power elite is omnipotent. They cannot foresee or control for every contingency. The success of Donald Trump’s campaign is one such contingency they didn’t foresee, and the rather ham-handed way they have responded to it demonstrates that the conspiracy is not all powerful. The Powers...
A couple of days ago I briefly tuned in to Mark Levin’s radio show. He was talking about Trump and trade, making the “comparative advantage” point you might remember from Econ. 101. That if each country makes what it can most cheaply, such as America designing iPhones and China assembling them (my examples, not his), then everybody comes off better. But if we impose tariffs, then prices go up for everybody, most hurting the poor when they go to buy stuff. So Trump’s attacks on Ford for moving a plant to Mexico, which on April 5 he called an “absolute...
The fable of the grasshopper and the ant, attributed to Aesop, is seminal to Western culture with its cult of human industry. Where a Russian or an Indian finds room and reason for relying on God or fate, an Englishman or a Frenchman hearkens to the moral of the fable, which miscasts fatalism as indolence and insouciance as folly. Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers, in consequence, step aside in this culture to make room for TV’s Kardashian sisters, as even the most intimate details of one’s private life’s take on the configurations of ardent toil. The English language is largely blind to...
I signed off last week’s post with the observation that rehabilitation – especially the posthumous kind – is a bribe that legality slips to justice, and since then I’ve read a little of the story of St. Joan of Arc, illustrating my point rather neatly. It may be remembered that, a quarter of a century after they had burned her at the stake in the marketplace at Rouen, the woman in question was exonerated on appeal by the Inquisitor General. A quarter of a century, it seems – in other words, a generation – is how long it usually takes,...
