What Is Actually Happening
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NOTE: the essay itself has been removed for the moment. Explanation later. As some readers of this blog know, I've written a book which is part memoir and conversion story, part cultural history of the phenomenon we call "the Sixties." I have a certain amount of evidence that the attempt is not really successful. It's…
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I'm constantly fighting the temptation to spend, or rather waste, a lot of time talking about current events, the perishing republic, and so forth. I believe it was in the very first year of this very long-running blog that I mentioned that urge, and noted that there was not much reason for me to carry…
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I'm sure he would be distressed by the level of deliberate and strenuous efforts to ratchet up racial animosity that are prevalent among certain classes of people now. At least I hope he would. The shocking thing, the thing which I at any rate certainly did not anticipate in the '60s when the major civil…
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It's perhaps a bit wrong of me to post this–or inappropriate, or ill-mannered, or something–because I probably won't actually watch the debate. Well, maybe I'll find a transcript and read it. But I'm posting it for one reason. I guess all conservatives and some others are aware of the intra-conservative argument which is represented by…
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Several days ago I wrote about the Ahmari-French argument, which might better be termed the liberal-postliberal argument (meaning classical liberalism, not the current party label), and which is currently happening on the right. See this post. I don't entirely agree with either side, and am not much interested in participating in the argument, so will…
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Some twenty-five years ago I wrote a piece for Caelum et Terra in which I asserted that a fundamental weakness of the American system is that it is agnostic on the ultimate questions. The Constitution defines a structure and a set of procedures that are meant to be philosophically and theologically neutral. It assumes a workable…
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It happened to come to my attention earlier today that this was the date in 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Turks. Many years ago I read a book about that event which was sad and disturbing, as is almost any account of mankind's propensity for conquest and slaughter. I thought often of that story…
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Or: "Driving Through The Caution Lights." In 1932 my grandfather was the judge in a case where the lynching of the defendants was a very real possibility. This is what he said to the court: Now, gentlemen, this is for the audience, and I want it to be known that these prisoners are under the…
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I find that I'm unable to stick with the intention of only reading one book at a time, so I try to limit myself to two, one fiction and one non-fiction. But I've just broken that, too, by starting Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle before finishing Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.…
Light On Dark Water 