War in the last century hasn’t changed nearly so much as the way we talk to ourselves about war, and try to find ways to make it into something else: a pathology of “capitalism,” for example, or a form of police work or, in large swathes of the popular culture, a species of mental illness….
What makes snarky Dana Milbank tick? A clue is provided in his Washington Post column today in which he favorably but fretfully compares the lack of military trappings for President Obama’s big speech on Afghanistan tonight to the way his predecessor used to carry on. “One of the common complaints of George W. Bush’s presidency,” he…
According to today’s New York Times “senior administration officials” — that is, the administration’s designated leakers — are saying that, “President Obama plans to lay out a time frame for winding down the American involvement in the war in Afghanistan when he announces his decision this week to send more forces.” In case it sounds…
For once the beautiful people are telling us that you can’t judge the past by the standards of today — as apology for a rapist. From The New Criterion of November, 2009
An ancient Greek cougar, re-imagined by a 17th century Frenchman, helps to reminds us that tragic things have now become comic — From The American Spectator of November, 2009
In the most recent issue of The Times Literary Supplement, Kate McLoughlin reviews Peter Parker’s Harry Patch: The Last Veteran and the Legacy of War (Fourth Estate, 328 pp. £14.99), a whole book about the last surviving British veteran of World War I, who died last July at the age of 112. That such a substantial…
In today’s New York Times, Ross Douthat notes some similarities between Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, not least the fact that both faced the same post-election choice. Did they want to take their newfound eminence seriously? Or did they want to cash in on their celebrity? For Palin, the serious path required at least serving out…
What art can there be in the portrayal of that which we have no business witnessing?
When I was in London recently, I had a quick tour round an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery titled “Beatles to Bowie: the ‘60s Exposed.” The British — or at least the British media — are obsessed with the ‘60s, I’m guessing, at least partly because that was the last time that Britain seemed to…
In politics as in so much else what you have to say depends on where — and with whom —you have to stand. Everyone has a point of view, and the political process is all about creating constituencies for particular points of view. But the media doesn’t believe in the necessity of these ordinary and universal contingencies. They…
In olden times, revolutions used to start among the potentially revolutionary classes with the idea that the king or, as it might be, the czar was being ill-served by his advisors. Dangerous and corrupt figures — sometimes nobles, sometimes agents, sometimes royal family members, especially if they were of foreign origin — must have been…
