Jimmy Carter
President Carter with a dangerous friend
(1 October, 1924 – 29 December, 2024) Jimmy Carter seems by popular acclaim to have been a very nice guy, choc-full of honesty and integrity. It just goes to show that such qualities are not necessary or sufficient to be a good President of the United States. Carter was not a good President, but he was liked and respected for the human qualities that bloomed post-office, notably in the fields of diplomacy and philanthropy. His presidential legacy would seem to be the 1978 Camp David Accords, where his tendency to micro-manage and his own personal bona fides got two enemies…
Continue Reading →Social Justice Fallacies
(By Thomas Sowell, 2023) Described by economic historian Niall Ferguson as a tour de force, Social Justice Fallacies arrives, like Spiderman, just in time, the imminent end of Peak Woke (aka Peak Stupid). Wikipedia defines Social Justice thus (footnote omitted): “Social justice is justice in relation to the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society where individuals’ rights are recognized and protected. In Western and Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fulfill their societal roles and receive their due from society. In the current movements for social…
Continue Reading →Paris, Texas
(Directed by Wim Wenders) (1984) Virtually no one has seen this film, but those who have, love it to bits. We caught it in Adelaide at a special New Year’s Eve screening. It is not as good as Wings of Desire, but then, what is? An alien film set in an alien landscape, ponderous and slow, it captures the heartbreaking loss of love between a couple, and reflects upon the nature of obsession. A child-like man (Harry Dean Stanton) stumbles out of the wilderness, is taken in and cared for by his brother (Dean Stockwell) who helps him reconnect –…
Continue Reading →Childhood
(By Shannon Burns – 2022) Having forgotten virtually all of my childhood (relentlessly happy I imagine, thus unfit to record), I tend to spurn memoirs of early years, having confined myself to undoubted classics, such as Gorky’s My Childhood, Speak, Memory, and Unreliable Memoirs. Childhood is a worthy addition to those classics and also stands as a bemused, relentless, almost angry monument to the power of compartmentalization (selective forgetting), and particularly, the redemptive and palliative power of great literature (Burns shares with others a love of The Brothers Karamazov). “We read to know we are not alone” (attributed to C.S. Lewis)…
Continue Reading →Amedeo Modigliani
(By Rita Kirkman) I frequently revisit artists who never fail to touch my heart with their unique talent for the creation of timeless beauty and their representations of the worlds in which they lived. Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy in 1884 to a French mother and a Jewish-Italian father. From the outset, he was plagued by chronic bad health which he endured for the rest of his short life. At age 7 he suffered from typhoid fever, and thereafter tuberculosis. He was very close to his mother. When he was 11, she noted in her diary: “The child’s character…
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