Livin’ in the USA
-
Never let it be said that I'm all doom and gloom. This is from a review in the March New Criterion of a book called Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta, a rather interesting-sounding book about an English journalist who went to live in the Mississippi Delta. As will come as no surprise at
-
The formerly all-, or perhaps all-too-, American Disney company can get along with brutal dictatorships but not Christians. That goes for Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Salesforce, Unilever, CNN, Apple, and others–including the National Football League (!). Have ordinary conservatives figured out yet that corporate America is as big a proponent of liberal social doctrine as the government? It’s becoming routine for
-
It is a great loss. Everybody has heard about Scalia's dissent in Obergefell vs. Hodges, in which the court discovered that marriage has nothing to do with sex. I had read a few quotes from the dissent, but not the whole thing until today. It's very much worth reading. Here is one powerful excerpt. This
-
Somewhere on this blog I quoted somebody saying something to the effect that it's very important, and requires continual effort, to understand what is really going on in the world. At least I thought I quoted it–I went looking for it, but couldn't find it. I did, however, find the passage below, and I think
-
Melodramatic? Yes, I suppose. But I'm afraid that the country is no longer run by people who love it.
-
…as the course goes on, the movement becomes centrifugal; we rejoice in our abandon and are never so full of the sense of accomplishment as when we have struck some bulwark of our culture a deadly blow. —Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences No way to delay That trouble coming every day —Frank Zappa, "Trouble Every Day"
-
I've been reading a collection of Nat Hentoff's music journalism, American Music Is, and came across this great anecdote: When Mr. [Robert] O'Meally was a student at Harvard, he approached [Ralph] Ellison, who was giving a talk, and asked: Don't you think the Harlem Renaissance failed because we failed to create institutions to preserve our gains?"
-
All she asked of God was a Mercedes. Well, that, and a TV, and a few drinks. But Jesus wants him to have a private jet. Because the one he has is getting old.
-
Fireworks from my rich neighbor's pier; pretty blurry but still sort of nice.
-
Yesterday on the way to work I merged onto Interstate 10 at the same time that a long line of bikers was passing through the interchange heading west, as I was. There were forty or fifty of them, I guess, all but a few of them single-file, so the line stretched out for more than
Light On Dark Water 