A bunch of charlatans and clowns met in Athens, Greece, at the end of September and, to use an old Greek expression, managed to make a hole in the water. In other words, they accomplished nada, but they stuffed themselves with feta and tasty Greek food, stayed at the best hotels, accepted honorariums, pumped up...
Post
Obama and the Cool Kids
The world will little remember what Barack Obama said during his disappointing presidency, despite his messianic promise and his reputation as rhetor par excellence. His words were not memorable to begin with. (Try to recall a quotation, apart from his famous campaign slogan.) More significantly, his words were not intended to be remembered. They served...
Post
The Summer of Erdogan’s Content
Combining elements of the Reichstag fire, the Night of the Long Knives, and Stalin’s Great Purge, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan took full advantage of the failed coup of July 15—a “gift from Allah,” as he put it—to execute a countercoup that has enabled him to purge all of his enemies, real or imagined. Within...
Post
Clichés Revived
Hell or High Water Produced by Film 44 Directed by David Mackenzie Screenplay by Taylor Sheridan Distributed by CBS Pete’s Dragon Produced and distributed by Walt Disney Productions Directed and written by David Lowery Hell or High Water has won extravagant praise from mainline film reviewers. This, I suspect, has to do more with its...
Post
All That Jazz
Extraordinary writing about music doesn’t come along very often, as I have been forced to notice by my own experience—as have my own put-upon readers! But in the realm of classical music, I would suggest that Donald F. Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis is an imposing composition, a stunt of writing—the freight of its assertions...
Post
The Gunfighter: Myth or Reality?
The reality of the Old West does not sit well with many in academe, who take pride in thinking they are debunking what they call cherished myths of the American people. I think this is especially the case when talking about gunfighters. There is clearly an impulse to attempt to destroy what most of us...
Post
Incalculable Rewards
Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. —Romans 12:2 While Mother Teresa was still alive, few who knew of her doubted that she would eventually...
Post
Loathing Beauty
I recently wrote a column for the London Spectator extolling the beauty of one of the Olympic competitors, a British high jumper. She was 19, café au lait, and did not win any medals. But she had wonderful poise, looked very feminine, and had an innocent way about her. Her name is Morgan Lake, and...
Post
Donald Trump and Conservatism
Donald Trump has shattered the false consensus of the Republican Party, the hitherto unrecognized tautology that GOP is conservative because conservative is GOP, and vice versa. In the process, we’ve been confronted by an embarrassing reality: We really have no idea what we mean by the word conservative. There can be little doubt that Hillary...
Post
Confronting Jihad
Paris (twice in ten months), San Bernardino, Brussels, Orlando, Nice, Ansbach, Munich, Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray: Hundreds of people blown up, pulverized, shot, knifed. Who is next? That such attacks will continue is certain. That the political class has no strategic blueprint for dealing with the scourge of jihad terrorism is obvious. That all Western security services have...
Post
Brexit: What Now?
It’s been quite a summer in the United Kingdom. On June 23, we the British people surprised everyone—including, perhaps most of all, ourselves—by voting to leave the European Union. That wasn’t meant to happen. All year, the E.U. referendum polls had shown a consistent advantage for the pro-E.U. “Remain” side. Celebrities and important people spent...
Post
Counting on Rosary Beads
The Legend of Tarzan Produced by Jerry Weintraub Productions Directed by David Yates Screenplay by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer from the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories Distributed by Warner Brothers The Conjuring 2 Produced by New Line Cinema Directed by James Wan Screenplay by Carey and Chad Hayes Distributed by Warner Brothers The Legend of...
Post
Another Touch of the Bubbly
Well, after 50 years and more in New York, I have heard the fat lady sing, and I know what that means. There have been some issues as the decades have zipped by, I must say; and I have dealt with the problems seriatim—riots, street crime, altercations, the murder of an elderly benefactor, and other...
Post
Of Sam and Siddiqui
“You know,” he said, “I wouldn’t have let your family in, either.” Standing in a conference room at the Congress Hotel in downtown Chicago, Sam held my gaze in that sideways glance of his, waiting to gauge my reaction. “I understand,” I said. “And I agree. You shouldn’t have. But I’m here now, so let’s...
Post
Not Nice
The Negresco is a beautiful rococo, belle époque hotel built around the turn of the last century on La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in the south of France. Even under today’s plebeian standards, when backpacking and sandal-wearing tourists invade its elegant quarters, it stands as a monument to a world that no longer exists. ...
Post
A Question of Identity
Most people have multiple identities, and contemporary America is tolerant of almost all of them, including men who think they are women and women who think they are men. There is one notable exception, though, to this general tolerance: people who attach any importance to the fact that they are white. The left, of course,...
Post
We’re All Extremists Now
The timing of Omar Mateen’s shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub was rotten for the Obama administration, because Secretary of State John Kerry had just published his carefully worded Joint Strategy on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), in which the word religion or religious appears nine times, but Islam, Islamist, and Muslim appear nary a-once. The administration’s...
Post
Survivors and Liars
Lauren Stratford might be called the woman who never was, or rather the woman whose existence we dare not admit. Even the soberest retelling of her fantastic story makes nonsense of so many contemporary assumptions and pieties. Over the last generation, ideas about child abuse have grown to the status of social orthodoxy in the...
Post
England’s Independence Day
The Brexit referendum of June 23 was a momentous event, comparable in long-term implications to the fall of the Berlin Wall a generation ago. It laid bare the yawning gap between the London-based political machine and the alienated and angry majority of “left-behind” citizens. Thanks to outgoing prime minister David Cameron’s miscalculation, the masses seized...
Post
Under Circe’s Spell
Love and Friendship Produced by Westerly Films Written and directed by Whit Stillman from Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Distributed by Roadside Attractions and Amazon Studios Whit Stillman’s new film, Love and Friendship, is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan, an early and somewhat unfinished work she wrote when she was all of...
Post
Get in Deep
Although music doesn’t have an obvious link with golf, I say it does, so that I can contradict myself immediately. The late Sam Snead was and still is well known for his beautiful swing, which he related explicitly to waltz-time, and more than once. Tempo and rhythm were aspects of motion, as he saw the...
Post
An Aroused Populace—With Guns
At the Pulse nightclub on June 16, Omar Seddique Mateen, a Muslim on his own personal jihad, opened fire on the crowd of more than 300. No one shot back. Some tried to hide in the bathrooms. One of those in a bathroom texted his mother, “He’s coming. I’m gonna die.” He was right. Mateen...
Post
Islam, Period
“The beginning of wisdom,” Confucius said, “is to call things by their proper name.” Donald Trump’s aphorisms are unlikely to make their way into fortune cookies, much less to go down in history, but on this point he and the great Chinese sage would seem to agree. In the wake of Omar Mateen’s massacre of...
Post
Playing Games With “Islam”
Dancing around an unpleasant reality is what politics is all about nowadays—Donald Trump excluded—with political correctness the enveloping cloud that hides truth and the facts. There are boundaries that are set by those faceless gray men and women none of us ever see, those who control the networks, the newspapers, and the academy—in other words,...
Post
Diary of a Driftless Conservative
“Hillsboro’s a conservative community,” said Robert, and for three days and three nights I attempted to figure out what he meant. He said it right after we arrived at his shop, high atop a lush, sylvan hill off Beaver Creek Road, five miles south of Hillsboro in Western Wisconsin, the “Driftless Area.” It’s called “driftless”...
Post
Strategic Crossroads
The aftermath of the Cold War has seen the emergence of what Robert Kagan and William Kristol have called “benevolent global hegemony.” The leaders of both major U.S. political parties have asserted that America’s unchallengeable military might is essential to the maintenance of global order. This period of “primacy” was marked by military interventions in...
Post
Why the Muslim Won
London is more pleased with itself than usual at the moment, which is saying something. The city has just elected its first Muslim mayor, and people here are calling it our “Obama moment.” The Great British Multicultural Experiment, which many thought had failed, is alive and well, they said. Sadiq Khan, the new mayor, is...
Post
Bad Investments Pay Off
Money Monster Directed by Jodie Foster Screenplay by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, Jim Kouf Produced by TriStar Pictures Distributed by Sony Pictures Mustang Directed and written by Deniz Gamze Ergüven Produced by CG Cinema Distributed by Cohen Media Group When I graduated from college with a degree in English literature, it occurred to me I...
Post
Homeland, Homesick, Homework
In 1836, Robert Schumann told the composer who had dropped by that his favorite of Chopin’s compositions was the Ballade in G minor, Op. 23, and the composer agreed with his judgment. Anton Rubinstein thought that everything to be revered in music died with Chopin in 1849, and for this declaration, he has been condemned...
Post
Trump and the Stakes of Power
My undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in political science, but the chief work that helped me to understand the practice of politics is one of history: The Stakes of Power: 1845–1877, by Roy F. Nichols. Political science shares with sociology a bias toward presentism, describing political structures as they currently exist with no sense...
Post
Laughing at Harry
Things have never been grimmer. Wall Street wolves have become billionaires while rigging the system, rats like William Kristol are showboating on television and spreading lies about The Donald, and the most dishonest couple since Bonnie and Clyde are getting themselves ready to reinhabit the White House. In times like these, there is only one...
Post
The Good Times Ain’t Over for Good
My great-grandparents loved music. When I look through old sepia-toned pictures from hog-killing day—here’s one of my great-uncles dangling a fat pig into a 55-gallon caldron of boiling water—I always see a guitar or two in the background. The natural rhythms of life, of the year, were marked by celebrations. There were luxury items to...
Post
Trump’s Global Vision
On April 27, Donald Trump gave a long speech on foreign policy. It was his first attempt to present his views on world affairs in detail. Refreshingly, it contained no reference to promoting freedom, democracy, and “human rights”; confronting tyranny and evil; or making the world a better place in the image of the exceptional...
Post
Shine Your Ever-Loving Light on Me
The Jungle Book Produced and distributed by Disney Pictures Directed by Jon Favreau Screenplay by Justin Marks from Rudyard Kipling’s book Midnight Special Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Written and directed by Jeff Nichols Are the Disney executives rethinking their political correctness? You know, their belief that homosexuals and transgender folk are uniformly good...
Post
The Okie From Oildale
A boyhood pastime when I was growing up was building radios. We did it in Cub Scouts and again, at a more sophisticated level, in Boy Scouts. Various kits were available, but we all started with a simple crystal set. It seemed almost magical that with a few components, essentially wire and a crystal, and...
Post
The Ties That Bind
I bought my wife tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert for Christmas. This may sound like the stereotypical man-gift—a present a husband bestows on his long-suffering spouse because he wants it for himself, like a riding lawn mower—but Amy really did want to see The Boss in concert again. Twenty-eight years ago, in our sophomore...
Post
Regrettable Regrets
E.M. Forster infamously said that, if he had to betray his country or a friend, he hoped he would betray the former. He was cheered for it by Oxford swells who had seen their elders slaughtered in the trenches during World War I, and by fellow homosexuals whose proclivities were illegal at the time. This...
Post
See Dick Potty
We’ve lost, I regret to inform you, yet another civilization-shattering battle. I mean the one over your daughter’s right to use a public restroom without worrying whether there is a dude doing his business in the stall next to her. This would be the same as the battle over your wife’s right to undress and...
Post
Avoiding Europe’s Mistakes
The two jihadist attacks in Brussels on March 22, which killed 32 people and injured 300 others, have changed the tenor of European media commentary. While many editorialists have routinely bewailed “alienation” among Muslim youths and warned against “Islamophobia” and “intolerance,” a significant minority are considering the causes of terrorism with courage and frankness. In...
Post
A Conservative Party in Chaos
At the end of last summer, British Conservatives looked to be in their strongest position in decades. In May, David Cameron’s Tories defied the polls and the experts to win a majority in the general election. The Labour Party then went bananas and elected as its leader an unreconstructed far leftist with a beard called...
Post
Revelation and Portent
Risen Produced and distributed by Sony Pictures Directed by Kevin Reynolds Screenplay by Kevin Reynolds and Paul Aiello 10 Cloverfield Lane Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures and Bad Robot Directed by Dan Trachtenberg Screenplay by Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle You could hardly choose a more unvarnished title for a retelling of...
Post
Terrorizing the Old Bag
Once upon a time, the New York Times called herself the Old Gray Lady; now, truth be told, she’s much closer to a Bitter Old Bag. Long-winded, overexplained, tendentious, and biased against anything normal, the Times is more to be pitied than loathed. And like a festering boil on an old bag’s backside, Donald Trump...
Post
Falling In (and Out of) Line
As I write, we have reached the stage of the Republican primary cycle that, since at least 1988, requires a pronouncement from the highest levels of the GOP: Now is the time for other candidates to back out and for all Republicans to support the frontrunner. Continuing the battle for the nomination will serve no...
Post
Incidentally White
“[T]o speak in general terms of the prototypical Southern conservative we would say first of all that he was not an alienated man.” —M.E. Bradford, “Where We Were Born and Raised” White nationalism has long existed on the borderlands of disaffected conservatism. Among its several denominations is the movement known as identitarianism, which combines the...
Post
Drafting Our Daughters
The leftist regime, incarnate in bold and belligerent Democrats and tepid, me-too Republicans, hates women, the same way it hates black people. The way you can tell is that you often hear them screaming (or sobbing) exactly the opposite, as justification for the passage of unprecedented social-engineering laws. Yet judging by the effects of both...
Post
Syria: Time for Maturity
A successful strategist is able to balance costs and benefits in the attainment of clearly defined objectives. This task demands prioritizing: Primary and secondary political goals need to be articulated, and military resources allocated accordingly. The Obama administration’s strategy for defeating the Islamic State (aka ISIS) has failed so far because a secondary objective—Washington’s a...
Post
We Asked For It
For almost two decades, or ever since Tony Blair became prime minister, the British have moaned about a lack of opposition in politics. All our politicians “sound the same,” we say—and they do, it’s true. Our parliamentary system may be designed for confrontation, but so far this century the Labour and Conservative parties seem to...
Post
Top of the World, Ma
Black Mass Produced by Cross Creek Pictures Directed by Scott Cooper Screenplay by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, based on the book Black Mass, by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill Distributed by Warner Brothers Ever since The Great Train Robbery flashed on the screen in 1903, Americans have been enthralled by gangster movies. They not...
Post
Henry Radetsky and Fritz Kreisler
Tossing around a word like music is problematical—and culture is even harder to deploy meaningfully. Nevertheless, I am going to give both a try in a revealing juxtaposition that was brought to my attention by that world-traveling anthropologist Henry Radetsky, an academic colleague and a valued friend. Henry is a cultured man I have learned...
Post
Our Special Middle Eastern Friend
As everyone knows, when you cross a camel with a mule, you get a member of the Saudi ruling family. A camel crossed with a snake produces a Qatari ruler, and, finally, a camel that’s made whoopee with a pig conceives a Kuwaiti sultan. Mind you, I’m being a bit rough on these animals, which...