Category: Feature

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

3 Dec, 2015

San Bernardino: The American Nightmare

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As Americans went to bed on December 2, they knew little of what happened in San Bernardino, where mysterious “white” assailants murdered 14 people  at a “social services center.”   Like most people, probably, we were otherwise occupied. We were watching an old episode of Comissario Montalbano.  Even this morning on NPR, which featured an interview with two “experts” on mass shootings, I  only accidentally learned that one of the shooters had a Pakistani Muslim name. Checking out the stories in the Washington Post, LA Times, and New York Times, I was able to glean only a few facts:  a...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

2 Dec, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Paris

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  I realize that visual observation alone, whether at its focus is human illness or social mores, is rarely conclusive when it comes to diagnostics, but that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I’ve got.  Parting with $100 in a café here is a foregone conclusion, while in the food halls of the Galleries Lafayette two bucks will buy you a piece of chocolate measuring one cubic centimetre. And yet this city eats like Rome, with the diners, like Olympic swimmers in the final yards of the race, twisting their apoplectically speckled necks this way and that, as though coming up...

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Feature / Fleming

13 Nov, 2015

The Art of Degradation, Part I

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It is a good thing that rhetoric is a lost art, because anyone with the most elementary knowledge of rhetoric would be sticking blunt objects into his ears to keep from hearing not just the politicians’ speeches but, even more, the pundit’s comments and questions. I am not referring to the bad grammar and mispronunciation of NPR newsreaders who cannot pronounce words like “tour” but invariably say “tore” or even to the effeminate and uncontrolled sing-song chanting of the announcers.  Delivery is a part of oratory but only a part.  From the rhetor’s perspective of 2500 years or so, political...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

13 Nov, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: To Say Nothing of the Dog

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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...

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Best Revenge / Feature / Fleming

13 Nov, 2015

Rome, Year 16 AMT

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I left Rockford with the best intentions.  I was going to write and post a diary of our six weeks (plus a few days) in Italy, even including the boring details of transatlantic travel post -911 or, as I prefer to call it, in the Age of Muslim Terrorism, as in “we left home on January 7, AMT 16. Our brief escape from the Midwestern Winter and presidential politicking seemed doomed from the start.  Jim Easton was kind enough to take us to the Van Galder bus station, where we soon learned that the departure schedule had recently been changed,...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

13 Nov, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: Gadarene Light

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Like any massive fraud, whether successful or unsuccessful, Russia’s recent parliamentary election is an interesting subject.  Fraud, swindle, pyramid–perpetrated or operated by all sorts of impostors, flimflam artists, and snake oil salesmen–where would world literature be without them?  Thomas Mann’s Hochstapler, or confidence man, in Confessions of Felix Krull is alone worth a million real-life fraud victims. Conrad would never have written Chance, the masterwork that pulled him out of obscurity, without its central character, the swindler Smith de Barral.  Gogol would not have written Dead Souls without Chichikov, the spectre of Western monopoly capitalism in the guise of a...