Once upon a time I mentioned William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee (1941) in a history seminar. The professor rolled his eyes: not that damned moonlight and magnolia again! A fellow student leaped to Percy’s rescue: Lanterns was a serious, thoughtful memoir for serious, thoughtful people. It is. And it is a portrait of a certain kind of Southerner...
First the crazies tore down statues they deemed offensive. Next they vandalized churches. Then they demanded trigger warnings on classic movies like Gone with the Wind and Blazing Saddles. If these monsters ever discover libraries, books will be next. Let me suggest you hoard copies of William McNeill’s The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) before...
The Anglican Church of Canada clutches its throat at the prospect of—Lord have mercy—shutting down its ministries and works 20 years from now. You know—putting up the “Closed” sign, the public demand for said ministries dwindling more with every passing year. So sharply have Anglican membership rolls declined since 2000 that, according to an internal...
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord”—a pretty flat declaration as reported by the Apostle Paul, leaving few gaps for politicians to fill at their own discretion. But you know politicians. Here we go with the impeachment hearings, an intended spectacle meant more as payback to President Donald Trump for winning the election...
Beto O’Rourke’s pullout from the presidential race leaves the Democrats with, oh, a mere dozen and a half or so candidates available to run the country. The country’s corresponding task is to keep awake for the remainder of the race. The pressing question is, or should be, what goes on here? What’s the mission—to can...
At its best, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke’s high-octane assault on religious freedom calls for brandy and an extended lie-down in a dark room. That’s the best that can be said of it. Its worst has to do with the disdain a midlevel presidential candidate exhibits for supernatural religion. That’s if he really meant what he...
[Above: Texas Governor Greg Abbott] The “progressive,” so to speak, vision of politics and public life envisions tighter and tighter government control over economic life, along with looser and looser controls over human behavior. I think you’d refer to the overall design as a paradox: a clash of methods and objectives. Elizabeth Warren wants...
There’s so much to say about Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment gig that one hardly knows where to start. But here’s a live possibility: We start with Sen. Lindsey Graham’s characterization of how this game is to be played. We’re trying to “try the president of the United States based on hearsay,” the South Carolina senator says–that...
We can’t seem to have a news event (and everything that happens in our capital city is a capital-E event these days) without the searing cry in the background, drowning out all other discourse: “Impeach! Impeach!” You might call it an echo of the old exhortation, “Hey, somebody get a rope!” One thing must be...
We the People… The world, my friends, is going to… and that’s just the point: We don’t know where in the world the world is going. Only that it’s moving at a high speed, in ways likely to upset existing orders. And the People are driving this show–the People, yes, as Carl Sandburg entitled his...
During Russell Kirk’s fruitful lifetime I regularly took his sage advice concerning books I ought to read. Dr. Kirk had seemingly perused everything worth perusing. Thus, on his say-so in 1968, I read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). I hate to tell you, but many...
“How Much Damage Have Republicans Done in the States?” Gosh! Worlds of damage, you’d imagine, if you’re a typical client of The New York Times nursery school system, where more and more government is good and less and less government is very, very bad—evidencing a failure on your part to appreciate the joys of governance...
A MarketWatch story this summer let us in on why millennials stash so little cash in 401(k) accounts. Like, given climate change, what’s the point? “The weather systems are already off,” a woman named Lori Rodriguez told a MarketWatch reporter, “and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to be a little apocalyptic.” A few days later,...
What you might find on a long walk, a determined walk, a walk of exploration, you never know, of course, until you take the next step. And the next; and the next—in Rory Stewart’s case, across the constantly revelatory terrain of the borderlands shared since Roman times by England and Scotland. To what end? Do...
With the Midterm Elections safely behind us, should we count on the left to renounce the fun of castigating nonleft types for their racism, sexism, and hetero normativism? Not on a bet. We’re at a new place in the world. I mean a world that, especially in its European components—this includes, naturally, us—has to widespread...
As Cole Porter slyly reminds us: “In olden days a glimpse of stocking / Was looked on as something shocking / Now heaven knows / Anything goes. . . . “ Well, you know, depending on the state of Puritan politics at a given moment. The Puritan habit of scolding—and gazing sourly upon—others for improper...
A “progressive” rap on “social conservatives”: All they crave is power to tell you whom to sleep with, and how, and what god (if any) to worship. This contrasts, naturally, with broad-minded types of the progressive persuasion, who don’t care what you do, morally speaking, so long as you don’t say or do anything insensitive...
“Dirt is dirtier than clean is clean,” observes one of John O’Hara’s characters—a history professor, I think—remarking on the human race’s observed partiality for darkness and grime in their news diet, rather than sweetness and light. Note the uproar over Brett Kavanaugh’s behavior—nice or nasty—at a high school party he attended at age 17, during...
Anti-Confederate liberals (of various races) can’t get over the fact that pro-common-sense liberals, moderates and conservatives (of various races) can’t go over the fact that rhetorical agitation over race has led us down a blind alley. The supposed “nationalist” rally in Washington, D.C., last weekend was more an embarrassment to its promoters than it was...
One of the really cool things about democracy is that voters tend to get what they want—which, um, can also turn out to be one of the really uncool things about democracy. A thing of real terror, if you want the truth. I tiptoe past the presidential election of 2016 on my way to look...
Neat! We know what the Supreme Court debate is all about—the debate, that is to say, over who shall take retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat. The debate is about abortion. Or so declares Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican moderate from Maine, whose vote could prove essential to confirmation of whatever nominee the White House puts...
I live in amity with the Southern Baptists, whose general tolerance for my fellow “Whiskeypalians” I take kindly. I wouldn’t dream of joining the media whoop-de-do over who among the Baptist faithful did what to whom, and when, and what to do now. You have read it all; I will not recount the imputations of...
I did mention Elvis once in a column, and in the ’90s I pointed to one Donald Trump as the TV star you’d least likely want sitting next to you at a dinner party. And yet the likelihood, back then, of ever mentioning Roseanne Barr—it just didn’t compute. But these days . . . I...
Let’s give credit where it’s due. Linda Greenhouse, retired Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, is a brilliantly qualified journalist: hard-working, creative, dedicated to the needs of her profession as she understands them. Which seems really to be the problem here; a problem large and grave, requiring critical analysis. Greenhouse’s very personal sense...
We were going to have this conversation one of these days—if you consider a barrage of claims, assertions, denials and calls for resignation a conversation. However, I digress. We were going to find ourselves tied in knots eventually over matters plucked from a traditional moral matrix and handed over for consideration to you and me...
Harvey Weinstein was just expressing his little ol’ self, right? That is what you do, even when it gets you fired, as happened to Weinstein, or suspended, as happened to Jemele Hill at ESPN, or threatened with suspension, as in Jerry Jones’ blunt warning to his Cowboys about “taking a knee.” The rule-less disorder of...
Let’s not stress out, shall we, while endeavoring to make sense of the fuss and foolishness over mass NFL boycotting of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” That would be because the fuss and foolishness themselves make no sense: save as a window for viewing the lunacies of 21st century life. Are we a nation or a holding...
Harking back fondly to the standards of half a century go—aah, weren’t those the blithe, happy days?—won’t get you much of a hearing from today’s self-appointed arbiters of college and university moral questions. I don’t care. Let’s do it anyway. The standards of half a century ago concerning male-female relationships were infinitely better—galactically better—than the...
You might say it has not been much of a month for the human race. I might myself contend that signs of life float on the flooded streets of Houston, Texas. People are acting the way people used to act, back before we were all required, seemingly, to stake out a political position and hate...
Who weeps, who languishes, who darts anxious glances at the clock just about the time Congress goes on vacation? The media, of course. With Congress out of town, what’s to report on, what’s to wring the hands over? As we all acknowledge, Washington, D.C., is the center of the galaxy. When Congress is in session...
What do we take away, then, from the earthquake on the Senate floor last week, with wisps of smoke still rising from the ruins of Republican efforts to do something—anything—likely to rationalize the health care mess? We take away, or should, the lesson that government can’t do everything, and when it tries to, you get...
The political left really, really, really doesn’t approve of Western civilization. If you doubt it, reference the maledictions poured out by the left on Donald Trump’s Warsaw speech last week. Trump had the effrontery to say, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Followed by rhetorical inquiries:...
Nobody ever called the late Rodney King a model citizen of Los Angeles. But he gave the world what was likely the most plaintive, plangent query of our time. He wanted to know, in the aftermath of the LA burning, “Can we all get along?” Can we—huh—rather than wallop each other and turn the air...
The world needs a common way of viewing the world. But it won’t likely have one anytime soon, as everyone is too set on enjoying (on no express warrant) “the right to be heard,” and the media is filling all ears with junk and gunk—the trademarks of an embarrassing moment in history. And we can’t...
So: more police on the streets; better intelligence; better security arrangements; less nonsense when it comes to tolerance for the outrageous. The British are doing what they must and can to ward off future terrorist-related catastrophes. It may help. It will likely not do the job with anything close to the thoroughness that the situation...
Tolerant, kind, generous, forbearing—none of this you’d call our everyday Islamic mass murderer. One thing you may justly call him: discerning. He knows the stakes in the war on terror. He knows the degree to which the Christian, or semi-Christian, West makes impossible the realization of his ideals. Accordingly, he murders explicit Christians, as many...
Let us concede that President Donald Trump talks too much and—maybe especially—tweets too much. Let us concede the complexity of his explanation(s) for firing former FBI Director James Comey: Comey was doing a bad job; Trump always meant to; Trump relied on the deputy attorney general’s observations, etc., in whatever order you want to consider...
The sullen self-righteousness of the progressive left (i.e., “We’re right, and the rest of you can go to the hot place!”) glows on college campuses everywhere but also in big cities—such as my beloved New Orleans, come to think of it: a locality embroiled in useless controversy over the removal of four Confederate-themed statues. City...
The coming fight over tax reform highlights distinct and seemingly irreconcilable views of government. We might want to reflect on them, as the major players ready the armament: brass knuckles, baseball bats, Fox News and New York Times commentaries. The two warring views: 1. Government knows more than you do. 2. On many topics, you...
The multiple thousands who marched throughout America and the world last weekend hoped to whip up support for “Science.” Well. I’m sold. And what next? Do more than a handful of people doubt the indispensability of science to the enrichment of the human condition? Science’s God-given nature may, in these secularizing times, meet with less...
What you end up with when the moral barriers topple is, not least, the end of due process at American colleges and universities. It’s a dreadful prospect you likely wouldn’t imagine without having scanned some of the stories on the rape crisis said to be spreading across American campuses. Supposedly, college women are at immense...
An uncomplimentary picture takes shape in the mind: the Senate’s Democratic minority (save for a higher-minded handful) standing in a row, thumbs affixed to noses, fingers waving provocatively in the air, mouths emitting a rude sound commonly known as “the raspberry.” Think we’re going to confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court?! Think we’re going...
A guide to the Neil Gorsuch nomination uproar: If you want the federal government to exercise greater and greater power over daily life in America, with minimum backtalk from us, the people, you deplore the prospective elevation of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. If, by contrast, you regard the expansion or contraction...
So what do I know anyway? I didn’t want him to begin with. I didn’t want him until it became painfully, obviously clear that he alone stood between us and the cultural and economic pillage contemplated by Hillary Clinton. And so, with never a backward look, my wife and I colored in the straight-Republican oval...
The U.S. media establishment has been up to its usual occupation during a presidential season: harrumphing, growling, tut-tutting at the idea of putting a non-“mainstream candidate”—someone other than a liberal Democrat, that is—in charge of anything more consequential, in Washington terms, than an armchair at the Commerce Department (if that). However, this year, with Donald...
The whole world appears to have gone nuts again—for about the ten millionth time in human history—but Dallas, unaccountably, you might say, has reaped enormous respect for keeping its cool and staying sane. You know—as sane as can be expected of any nest of right-wing, gun-toting, big-haired, president-killing yahoos. I know such news is hard...
The man best qualified to run the House of Representatives (I think so, anyway) won the votes necessary to run the House of Representatives—to the extent that any man or woman of like qualifications can be said to “run” a political enterprise at odds with the understanding of its creators and shapers. The same could...
Is Vladimir Putin the new leader of the free world? All we currently know is that the job seems open, and that Putin has seemingly sent in his resume, showing openness to the idea of an anti-Islamic State alliance with British Prime Minister David Cameron. For contrast, see Barack Obama’s demeanor while talking to the...
I tell you, it’s great to be alive and cognizant that the greatest thing going on at the University of Missouri, large-domed citadel of learning and culture, is—you guessed it—football! Truly, the U of M Tigers don’t have such a tiger-ish record this season, just four wins against five losses (with four of those losses...
By Monday, interestingly enough, the Russian invasion of Syria was receding as a topic of public concern. Apparently there no longer seemed anything explosive in the tidings of Vladimir Putin’s slam-bang entry into that remote theater of conflict. This was notwithstanding those Russian airstrikes against the anti-Assad rebels whom the United States, supposedly, has been...