Category: Feature

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Wednesday’s Child: Super Wednesday

  I have not really been following the fruit salad of the American presidential election, as the only apparently human being among the Republican candidates might have bumbled, and yesterday’s Super Tuesday is no exception. So I write this through a fog of wilful ignorance, its mists made all the more impenetrable by the Atlantic’s breadth.  At times, however, such scanty impressions, gleaned almost against one’s will, have some salubrious value, as not buying a used car simply because one had taken a dislike to the peonies on the salesman’s shirt can have a salutary effect on one’s wallet. Carson,...

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East is East, Part II ON THE HOUSE

If human experience were rmin glacier, slowly accreting facts, pebbles, and statistical debris in its course, some case might be made for writing impartial history, but most of what he call history is a conflict of wills, between leaders and nations.  Who could write an impartial account of the Crusades?  Not a faithful Catholic or Muslim, and certainly not an atheist who is “neutral” on the religious claims of the two parties: he, in fact, has the biggest ax to grind.  I prefer Hilaire Belloc or the Whig historians who never concealed their prejudices or their agenda. Once upon a time,...

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On the House: East is East, and West is Wuss, Part I

This piece was published in a very slightly different form in 1999.  It is being offered free to our free subscribers, and I hope that they will enjoy it.  I also hope that they will see their way to joining us more fully by subscribing to the website. If a civilized man, as it is sometimes said, can hold two ideas in his mind at the same time; post-civilized man goes one step farther and sees nothing wrong with maintaining contradictory opinions on any subject that comes up: We say simultaneously that the Russians are animalistic drunkards with no aptitude...

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Die Götterdämmerung

Germany and the rest of Western Europe are being invaded with weaponized immigration.  It has become apparent that Germany, not to be confused with the Federal Republic of Germany which is an abstraction or a “firm” as those who still consider themselves Germans call it, has all but lost its soul.  The objective correlative with its heritage has been broken by Nazi usurpation of much that was true and good and by the very effective supersecessionist reeducation program imposed on Germany after its defeat in WWII. Western liberalism was apparently more effective than the draconian real-existierende Sozialismus of communist East...

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Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Vienna

“If somebody were to prove to me once and for all that Christ is not Truth, and if indeed it was so that Truth lay outside Christ,” Dostoevsky famously proclaimed, “I would still choose Christ over Truth.”  Some years after the Russian writer had sounded this chord in one of his novels, Vasily Rozanov, in some ways his only spiritual heir, came up with his own version of the credo. Rozanov was a thinker who combined the flamboyance of Oscar Wilde with the originality of Friedrich Nietzsche and the modesty of Marcus Aurelius, and I have always marvelled at the...

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Wednesday’s Child: Letter from London

  From London, though I’m yet to arrive there, with stops at Vienna and Paris, but what’s a little topographic imprecision among friends?  Vienna, because the eccentric diva who, as the reader may recall from my New Year missive, wore three different wigs in a single night, has invited us there; Paris, because a benevolent friend there gives my wife sound advice with regard to her concert career; and finally London, because there Irina has just had published a monograph on her collection of paintings, a massive tome entitled Flying in the Wake of Light.  Irina Stolyarova – such is...

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Every Man a President

The word is out from the highest bully pulpit in the land:  Donald Trump will not be President.  Why, because being President “is a serious job.”   President Obama went on,  by way of the via negativa,  to define the presidency by saying: “It’s not hosting a talk show or a reality show, it’s not promotion, it’s not marketing… It’s not a matter of pandering and doing whatever will get you in the news on a given day.” It is pretty obvious that the President has been spending a lot of time looking at his image in the mirror, and...

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The Media Masseurs, Part I

Here in Rome I read Midwestern news stories many hours late or, if the events took place at night, seven hours early.   In the morning, while my distant neighbors were still asleep, I read about the machete-wielding maniac in Columbus, Ohio, who attacked the diners in a Middle Eastern restaurant.  It was hard to get any hard facts.  The one fact that stuck out was the image of the Israeli flag in the window of a restaurant named Nazareth, along with other symbols and words in Arabic.  Some report did either report or conjecture that the owner had tried...

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Wednesday’s Child: The Way to Malibu

“Centuries after Great Schism”–well, some ten of them, to be more precise–“Pope and Patriarch are to Meet.”  So a headline in the Financial Times.  It makes me wonder if, in their editors’ and reporters’ view, all news with only a remote historical precedent is ipso facto grounds for optimism.  Now, seeing as God isn’t really these people’s beat, let’s poke around for an example closer to their hearts to illustrate my misgivings.  What about “Corporate Tax in France without Parallel at 99%”?  Or “Germany: Banks Nationalized Overnight”?  Or “All Private Property Abolished in Britain”? “Ah,” I may be told, “but...

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On the House: The End of the American Century

About On the House.  From time to time I am posting free pieces, many of this old (this one dates back to 1999), partly to remind people that the truth has been “out there” for more than a two years and partly to entice casual readers into subscribing.  A Silver level subscription costs nothing per month–two packs of cigarettes, a bottle of cheap wine, a month of Netflix.  This is a non-profit operation, believe me, but I am no longer convinced of the wisdom of giving things away.  I recall hearing something about casting pearls before swine.  Then, come on, do not...