On the horror of bad restauration. “The leader of all the devilry is of course the United States, which is clocked at an average of one hour and one minute. In short, in this whole sad sublunary world, only in France, Italy, Greece, and Spain do people spend more than two hours a day in prandial concourse.”
The aspiring Aztec visits his office, where all is not well, and makes up his mind to consult the Paramoral Investigator, who turns out to be weirder and more offensive than he had imagined.
The left breaks out into these fits, it seems to me, when they have been temporarily frustrated in that long march toward moral anarchy and political tyranny that my late friend Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny. Not to worry, as they say. They can be as sure of their victory as Jeremiah was sure of the Babylonian triumph over the faithless people of Judah.
This piece, on the perfidy of the GOP, was published in November of 2004. While no one cares much about George W. Bush and the neoconservative traitors who owned his foreign policy, it may serve as a useful reminder.
Jerry Jeff Davis Brown is taking California out of the Union. Is it too early to celebrate?
President Trump is undoubtedly a creep, but what else can one say of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton? Jack Kennedy and his disgusting brothers? Franklin Roosevelt? Lincoln, whose foul mouth around women, when he was in Congress, caused decent colleagues to shun his company?
Most Americans, hell-bent on success, do not dream of conquering nations or murdering our neighbors. Our vast ambitions are defined by bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger blonds.
To begin with I ought to reassure the gentle reader that any resemblance between the title of this post and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is purely coincidental, though a literary charlatan in the audience may well argue that, like the pretentious novel, my post “deals with issues of loss, subjectivity, and the problem of perception.”
In one of Douglas Addams’ very silly books, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the egocentric two-headed president of the universe, is condemned to undergo the ordeal of the Total Perspective Vortex. It is an excruciating form of torture that exposes the criminal to a sense of the infinite size of the universe and his own small place in it. The result is the annihilation of the self. The device was designed by a scientist who got tired of his wife telling him to put things in perspective. The nagging wife might just as well have been Adam Smith or William Godwin or any...
North American English is now the dominant form of the language, and as one can tell by reading British newspapers or listening to British speakers, under American influence American English is edging out other, local varieties of English, bringing with it American habits of speech and the habits of mind that go with them as it does so. This is not necessarily a welcome development. As anyone who moves to America from England immediately notices, besides the obvious differences in sound, one peculiar, noticeable feature of North American English is a constant tendency towards euphemism, suggesting that Americans, however big-hearted...
