The Club of Cool
Back in the Pepsi Generation 45 years later — From The New Criterion of February, 2009
Entry from February 27, 2009
A report in today’s (London) Daily Telegraph is striking to a cis-Atlantic reader because it is scarcely possible to imagine that it could ever appear in the American media of today. Parents of servicemen killed in Afghanistan talk positively about their dead children and the job they were doing when they died: Rfn Gunn’s family…
The Mind of the Past
In order to create and sustain public interest in the past, it seems, we have to take out of it all that made it the past and not the present — From The American Spectator of February, 2009
Oops! I’ll Do It Again. And Again. And Again…
Yet another manifestation of the do-over mentality that dominates our culture and allows us to hide from “the unforgiving minute” — From The Wall Street Journal of February 27, 2009
Entry from February 25, 2009
Here’s the opening paragraph of Michael Shear and Anne Kornblut’s Washington Post news item on last night’s speech by the President to a joint session of Congress: “President Obama offered a grim portrait of America’s plight in an address to a joint session of Congress last night, but he promised to lead an economic renewal that…
Entry from February 23, 2009
Well, they don’t call them “progressives” for nothing, do they?. If you stayed up late enough last night, you must have heard Sean Penn at the Academy Awards ceremony putting his fine feelings on display as he accepted the award for Best Actor for his genuinely fine portrayal of the title character in Milk. He…
Entry from February 21, 2009
See if you can spot the hidden assumption, astonishing when you think about it, in the following, which comes from the lead to an opinion piece by Ronald Goldfarb in tomorrow’s Washington Post — they sometimes publish these on their website a day early — about why the executive branch of our government should be forbidden…
Entry from February 19, 2009
About the dire condition of America’s beloved newspaper industry, there is yet more wailing and gnashing of teeth today from Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post and Paul Starr in The New Republic. What, will the line of journo Jeremiahs stretch out to the crack of doom? “A wave of newspaper shutdowns seems likely this year as…
Entry from February 17, 2009
This morning I heard the announcer on all-news WTOP, Washington’s top-rated radio station with a sterling reputation among both broadcasters and journalists, introduce a segment on the newly-passed 787 billion-dollar “stimulus” bill by saying that “the stakes could not be higher.” By this he must have meant — at least — that there was some…
Frost/Nixon
The saga of media triumphalism continues and itself reaches a triumphalist stage
Entry from February 12, 2009
The passage of the “stimulus” bill ought to be a reminder of a curious disconnect between the Obama mythos, still being routinely celebrated in the press, and the grubby actualities of government. It reminds me, as so many things in our postmodern politics do, of that great exercise in political moralizing, Al Gore’s Oscar and…