Monumental Disasters
Gradually, the politicization of our culture has undermined our ability to understand or learn from the past — From The American Spectator of April, 2014
Negative side effects
On popular historicism and the usefulness of claiming "history" as an ally — From The New Criterion of April, 2014
Entry from April 24, 2014
The subject of my last post — history that is lost to the next generation, either on account of miseducation or the political motivation of the educators or, most likely, both — also has a literary and linguistic dimension, as I realized while reading Henry Hitchings’s review in The Wall Street Journal of Paul Dickson’s Authorisms….
Entry from April 18, 2014
In the current issue of The New Criterion I write en passant about the "Common Core" curriculum in history which the educational establishment has been so terrifyingly successful in imposing on America’s school-children. Remarkably, there is no body of knowledge attached to the history standards. History, along with "social studies," is itself tellingly subsumed under…
Entry from April 11, 2014
"If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country," wrote Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas, a book which Theodore Dalrymple thought ought rather to have been called How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved, "let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct…
Le Week-End
An unfunny comedy whose reason for being appears to be a celebration of the extravagant self-pity of its central character
The Naked and the Dead
Some entertainers who dare to take on, or at least to ignore, political correctness — From The American Spectator of March, 2014
Enviable positions
When politics is all a matter of good guys and bad guys, it’s only a matter of time until the bad guys become Nazis — From The New Criterion of March, 2014
Entry from March 27, 2014
Here we go again. Ezra Pound said that poetry is news that stays news. If so, the news that we don’t have to worry about our grammar anymore has got the Cantos beaten all hollow, as it has been making headlines since long before ol’ Ez kicked the bucket more than 40 years ago. The…
Past, The (Le Passé)
Another example of old-fashioned, plot-driven movie-making for grown-ups from the director of A Separation
Entry from March 18, 2014
Lately, I found that I was being Twitter-bombed by the sort of person — and what a lot of such people there are on Twitter! — who seem to think it a devastating retort to someone they disagree with politically to call him "moron" or "racist." My sin, in case you haven’t heard about it…