Maybe not all but certainly some of the civil unrest that is both cause and consequence of the murder of five Dallas police officers last week is owing to the impoverishment of our political language. Take the slogan "Black Lives Matter" — an example of hash-tag politics whose vacuousness makes even the bumper-sticker politics of…
A funny-serious adventure in the photogenic New Zealand wilderness that, like the author’s Boy has coming-of-age pretensions
The first line of the Daily Telegraph’s obituary of Michael Herr tells us that he was "the author of Dispatches, the definitive account of the war in Vietnam." Whether the authority for such an extraordinary statement is the blurb from John le Carré which follows (and also appears on the front cover of my copy of…
The ladies and gentlemen have long since left the building — From The New Criterion of June, 2016
"To the Republicans who have been silent on Trump," read the headline to Fareed Zakaria’s op ed in The Washington Post last weekend "— your honor is at stake." In the article to which the headline was attached mention was made of several prominent Republicans who have not (so far) repudiated Mr Trump as their party’s…
A fantastical satire against bureaucracy whose real-world target is less than immediately recognizable
A well-made film that teaches an obnoxious lesson
Hitchcock made the movies and the movies made post-modernism — from The Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2015/16
This is news? Today’s New York Times headlines: "Hillary Clinton to Portray Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Positions as Dangerous." Did they think maybe she was going to offer praise for Mr Trump and his foreign policy positions? Well, the paper comes out every day, and maybe they couldn’t find anything else to write about Mrs…
What if the Trumpists’ much-mentioned grievance is not so much their own misfortunes as the insufferable self-righteousness of their supposed betters? — From The New Criterion of May, 2016
Your blogospondent has been reading with great interest David Rieff’s new book, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies — partly in order to determine whether or not it has been inspired by the new vogue among the militantly politically correct for forgetting the past — or, more accurately, misremembering it. I haven’t…
