He’s at it again. The Wall Street Journal at the weekend ran another piece by Professor John McWhorter of Columbia heralding the increasingly common theatrical practice of translating the plays of Shakespeare into simpler, more contemporary language in order to facilitate comprehension. Or at least what audiences wishing to be spared the trouble of understanding what…
America’s political culture becomes ever more royalist — and contemptuous. From The New Criterion of September, 2015
The invitation list to the White House for the welcoming ceremony ostensibly in honor of the Pope’s visit to America next week is yet another example, if one were needed, of the breakdown of civility in America. Or rather, it was not so much the invitations to avowed opponents of the Church’s doctrine and teachings…
Or else what? It’s hard to believe that President Obama has never heard these words or felt the cold, hard grip of fear upon the heart that they induce in normal people when their bluff is called by a bigger, stronger, meaner adversary whom they have had the temerity or foolishness to challenge or reprove….
A Victorian alliance of love and politics — From The Weekly Standard of August 24- 31, 2015
According to The New York Times, "State by State, [the] Democratic Party Is Erasing Ties to Jefferson and Jackson." I’d have thought that "ties" were things to be "cut" rather than "erased," but it turns out that "erased" in the once-favored etymological sense of "rooted up" is what the headline writer meant. For nearly a…
The collision at the corner of Language and Politics — From The Weekly Standard of July 27, 2015
When I was a youngster, all school children knew the story of Henry Clay’s having said, "I had rather be right than president." At least they knew the quotation, even if they didn’t always know the context of "the Great Compromiser’s" paradoxical refusal to budge from his own middle-of-the-road position on slavery, the principal matter…
Hillary Clinton came to Northern Virginia, where I live, the other day and addressed what The Washington Post described as "a crowd of several thousand Democrats" at George Mason University. "Several," as we learned a few lines further down, meant two — although the Patriot Center where she spoke can hold ten. Thousands, that is. This…
Sentimental but ruthless, the politics of grievance carries the day — From The New Criterion of June, 2015
In physics, so they tell me, the great white intellectual whale which has so far eluded even the brightest minds is what they call the "unified field theory" which would account for discrete descriptions of physical phenomena — such as general relativity and quantum theory — relations between which remain largely undiscovered. If there are…
One sympathizes, naturally, with the incomprehension of Ella Whelan of Spiked Online when she writes of Hillary Clinton’s Roosevelt Island speech as follows: She claimed she would be running ‘for all Americans’ and presented herself as having come from a history of hardship. Apparently, Clinton’s late mother, Dorothy Rodham, had a relatively tough start in life….
