The task before me is daunting. More difficult yet than attempting to persuade the gentle reader that a Pax Ukrainiana is upon us, with merry paysans et paysannes frolicking in the evergreen groves of liberty beneath boughs laden with golden fruit.
Tonight, I went to a political campaign event where state and local candidates or their representatives were meeting the public in my county. I spoke to a gubernatorial candidate, and a representative for another at the event, both Republican. I asked very superficial questions about how these two candidates felt about Southern heritage.
Of the first generation of top Hollywood directors—Griffith, DeMille, Stroheim, Walsh, Curtiz, Chaplin, Dwan, Fleming, Brown, Lubitsch, Sternberg, Ford, Borzage, Vidor, Keaton, Hawks, Wellman, Capra, McCarey… W(oodbridge) S(trong) Van Dyke II (1889-1943) is the most unjustly forgotten and underrated.
“Truth is the first casualty of war” is an old saying, obviously true during the Ukraine War. I hate this war with a passion, but it’s still necessary to follow it because it reveals so much about the state of the world today, especially the regime that’s destroying my beloved America.
I have been asked, many times, to explain my objections to John Locke and his theory of natural rights and the social contract. One way to address that question is the discussion of Sir Robert Filmer Patriarcha I undertook some years ago.
Russia’s military humiliation in Ukraine, especially if viewed through the magnifying lens of the West’s collective response to the invasion, is the most hopeful geopolitical event I have witnessed in my lifetime.
Biden’s State of the DisUnin was an incoherent disgrace even by his standards. He gloried over the war he did the most to cause by not giving Russia a guarantee Ukraine never would join NATO.
“So,” Charley said after a pause, “the purpose of art—at least in the sense that you are using the word—is not simply to have an effect on the audience or reader, even if the effect is good?”
Though my innate contrariness rebels against creeping literalism, it would be perverse not to mention the six-day war in which Putin’s army has already sustained greater human losses, 6727 dead and wounded as of this writing, than in either of the two Chechen wars or after a decade of fighting in Syria. I can, however, lessen the injury to my authorial ego by at least beginning from afar.
The first thing our rulers do, when they want us to approve some act of folly or aggression, is to change names.
