The Great American Jerk is a chameleon who changes colors according to circumstances, from obsequious to bullying, from pious to lewd.  He may, on some occasions, display buck-waving generosity and on others check-splitting stinginess, but underneath there is always the baby boy or girl who wants what he or she wants, whether it is...

  (Inspired by Clyde Wilson) Every human society has had its share of offensive or annoying people: busybodies and bores, poseurs and bullies, cheapskates and  check-grabbers, hypocrites and egomaniacs.  You might even be able to define some societies by the offensive characters they tend to produce or by the qualities they find most offensive.   Southerners used to regard...

  THEY’RE BACK! No, not the demons that terrorized the Freeling family in Poltergeist II. I am referring to the far more menacing demons who are already wasting the TV lives of sports fans and Idol watchers, the presidential candidates.  Barack Obama has already thrown his hat into the ring–though considering his intelligence and manners, it must...

  Ancien Regime III b In his first and vitally important chapter, Tocqueville says that true aristocracies impose their system of values on a nation, but in France the nobles permitted the philosophes to impose their ideology not only on the education of the young but also even onto the edicts of the regime which began to...

  1 April 2011 Early Wodehouse A few months ago I decided I would look into some rather early Wodehouse to see how he developed.   I read, in no orderly sequence, Mike and Psmith, Psmith in the City, Psmith Journalist, Picadilly Jim, Damsel in Distress,  and The Coming of Bill. They were all delightful, but the first...

  There must be some reason or reasons, why the Jerk has become the archetypal American character.  Without going too deep into themysteries of social history, here is a little experiment that might stand in for several hundred pages of tedious social history.   Herewith a little theoretical foundation for my continuing study of Jerkus americanus....

  I have so far refrained from commenting on the Libyan fiasco.  I do not understand what is going on, and  the administration has so far not condescended to enlighten us.  We are not taking sides or deciding the future of the country–that is up to the Libyans, we say–but then declare that no outcome...

  James O’Keefe scored another victory recently, when his group tricked Ron Schiller, an NPR fundraiser into making statements that were soft on militant Islam and expressed contempt for Middle American conservatives.  As much as I detest NPR and all its works, the attack on the fundraisers is either naive or disingenuous.  Schiller may well...

  Robert Spencer is making something of a nuisance of himself these days.  I don’t know much about Spencer. I do not spend a lot of time looking at websites and hardly ever visit Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch.  It is not that I particularly disagree with him on the Muslim threat; it is only that...

  In the third book of his Ancien Régime, Alexis de Tocqueville takes up the intellectual origins of the French Revolution.  AT notes the at first sight strange phenomenon, that in absolutist France intellectuals were free to challenge the most fundamental political, social, and religious institutions and beliefs.   While each “philosopher” had his own system and...

  Today’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church has encouraged many decent conservatives to think that the United States will not so quickly go down the garden path of political correctness as Canada and the EU.  I think this view is seriously mistaken.   As everyone knows, the Westboro Baptist “Church”...

  What do you do?  The is the question that everyone should have been asking from the first news of  Raymond Allen Davis’s arrest in Pakistan three weeks ago.   Mr. Davis, after shooting and killing two Pakistanis, was put under arrest. The US immediately demanded his release, claiming diplomatic immunity and insisting that he...

  A Random Walk Through the Mall The adventure begins as you drive into the parking lot.  In the many states where traffic laws do not extend to private property, the lot should have a large sign: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Malls are private property, and when some cowboy pulls out of a parking...

The cry of the protestors in Cairo, as they greet the news of the military coup that has toppled Hosni Mubarak.  What’s next?  An interim government, perhaps the troika proposed by Mohammed El Baradei, with the reality of power remaining in the hands of the military.  Then comes the countdown to the day when the...

  “He who dies with the most toys wins.”   Every year on Black Friday, American shoppers brave the bad weather and go out to do battle with other shoppers in a contest that will determine who pays the least for the most stuff they are better off without.  Twenty years ago, the worst these...

  In the second book, Tocqueville tries to demonstrate a double thesis, which may be summarized as: 1) The centralized authoritarian regime installed by the FR represents continuity with the old regime, not a break with the past, and 2) there is, nonetheless a qualitative difference between the benevolent busybodying of the Bourbons and the...

  The second half of the Aeneid has rarely delighted readers to the same extent as the first half, but the poet tells us explicitly that in bringing Aeneas to Italy he has embarked upon a greater theme.  It would be a mistake, then, to underrate books 7-12, though it is probably a good idea to read...

  On his deathbed in Washington, Richard Holbrooke allegedly told his Pakistani surgeon, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”  Perhaps the story is true.  After all, Holbrooke, though one of the greatest liars in public life, must have told the truth occasionally and his words may even have been delivered accurately by the...

  Nearly everyone in his right mind complains about cell phones going off in church or the people who shout into their phones in airports or on the plane, but those Jerks are for the most part anonymous strangers whom we shall never see again.  Any attempt to correct them might backfire.  But what about...

  The USA regime will soon recover from the embarrassments created by the massive release of diplomatic documents onto the Internet.  There will be investigations and prosecutions.  There will be ironic attempts by Madame Clinton and her colleagues to pretend that personal attacks on heads of state and foreign diplomats are de rigueur in the...

  The full title should be: Jerks, How to Spot them and How to Deal with them without becoming one of them yourself. The Jerk is the defining character of postmodern America.  What the Man of Faith and the Man of the Sword were to the Middle Ages, the Jerk is to our own age....

  Thanksgiving is the time of year when Americans are supposed to take stock and give thanks.  The mere  fact that we can take stock should make us grateful to be alive and conscious.  This Thanksgiving, I am particularly thankful that I don’t have to go anywhere by plane.   Over the past three or...

  “In the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men….And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age.”  The discussion of prophetic literature with which Chesterton begins The Napoleon of Notting Hill is itself an accurate piece of prophecy.   As Chesterton points out,...

  This is politics in America. Item One:  NBC’s Matt Lauer asks the the California gubernatorial candidates if they will stop negative ads, and when Meg Whitman declines, she is booed by women.  This is supposed to mean something, when feminists and lesbians boo a Republican woman.  But feminists hate women and to the extent...

  It is a feminist truism that women have always worked.  By work is not meant so much the routine tasks of the household—the storage and preparation of food, the making and cleaning of clothing, and the household chores of sweeping, cleaning, and tending children—but the degraded and degrading concept of work as a job for...

  After receiving a number of kind messages, imploring me to continue this discussion, I have decided to ransack some old essays for more material on the question of women. If I do not respond to every writeback, it is because of lack of time. It is a feminist truism that women have always worked. ...

  In the Russian novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, a family feud breaks out when a young Cossack intervenes to prevent a neighbor from beating his wife to death.  He suspected her of adultery, but he had been beating her systematically from the first day to punish her for being raped before getting married. ...

  In the Anglo-American tradition of Common Law, the status of wives was defined by the principle of coverture, which meant that the wife’s legal identity was merged with that of her husband. [i] When Hamlet is taken to task for addressing his stepfather as “mother,” he replies: “Father and mother is man and wife, man and...

  A nation of 300 million souls—richest and most powerful in the world, for all its messes and perturbations—needs a turning radius wide as the future. But you know what—realization precedes intellectual assent, which precedes needed action. There’s much to be hopeful about as the nation goes in for its electoral physical. Valuable realizations are...

  The recent decision to deploy women on submarines has been hailed as a victory in the continuing struggle to liberate women from the oppression of the domineering male sex.  Conservatives have generally deplored the move, citing the inevitable sexual tensions and lowering of morale that will result from putting young males and females in...