The American Freak Show
Every morning in Rome, I scanned the America news from my cellular telephone, and, as Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments rolled by, I felt as if I were watching a parade of freaks
Every morning in Rome, I scanned the America news from my cellular telephone, and, as Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments rolled by, I felt as if I were watching a parade of freaks
UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky used to be one of my sources on legal matters when he was a prof at USC, then dean and founder of the UC Irvine Law School. I haven’t talked to him in many years.
An obvious defect of the U.S. national election system is it can’t eject an obviously demented president seeking World War III with Russia.
Yesterday was the thousandth day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I published an article on Newsmax entitled “1000 Days of Fratricide” and thought it might be a good idea to present its overarching contention here.
Last night I said good by to our last guests but one. I greeted the group In Pisa on the afternoon of the third. We had by then been in Italy since October 22.
The day after Trump’s victory, a correspondent dropped me a note to ask if I agreed with a Chronicles contributor–whether current or former I do not recall–who told him that the country had turned the corner, and we could count on a counter-revolution that would fix the immigration crisis, restore law and order to the streets, and turn back the anti-human sexual revolution.
For my wife’s birthday the other week we took a trip to the countryside to visit a famous vineyard, with Giulio doing the driving. There was another couple to lunch, English people from Sussex, she a bubbly IT specialist, he a teacher at a school near Cambridge. His name was Larry and he said he taught drama.
I am grateful to fate that my life as a journalist has never swerved from the path charted at the start, a way of looking at the world without grasping for pegs on which to hang stories. The peg for every story written today – inescapably, thunderously, deafeningly – is the result of the American election, a result unknown to me at this writing yet one, I concede, that may well decide the future of Western civilization.
I am not somebody, of all people, who would ever forget St. Luke’s admonishment that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth,” but when it comes to the possession of a good bottle of cognac, covetousness proves the stronger.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed on that joyous Christmas Day in 1991, I’ve been pushing for America to lead the world in this multipolar direction. We could have been a benevolent First Among Equals. Instead, we insisted it was a “Unipolar Moment” with the U.S. as the “sole remaining superpower.