Category Archive: American Politics
The Dying Citizen
(By Victor Davis Hanson) (2021) This is a thought-provoking argument that the classical concept of citizenship (the essence of a democratic nation) as developed and refined from the Greeks, Romans, and ‘aristocratic’ revolutionaries, is becoming denuded of meaning or relevance, and that a new tribalism (subject to a new “balkanized spoils system“) is fast replacing it, per the convenience of the governing elites (on the divide-and-rule paradigm). The author ranges wide but without attenuation, contrasting citizens with peasants (we prefer the more colouful term ‘peons’), residents and tribes, and then showing how the very concept of American citizenship – necessary…
Continue Reading →The Power Broker
(Robert Moses and the Fall of New York) (by Robert A. Caro, 1974) That this brick of a book (well over a thousand pages) about public infrastructure is so compelling is due to, first, its traverse of key decades in the rise of America (1920s to the 1960s); second, the author’s awesome depth of research and keen grasp of his subject; and third, the subject himself: the most famous public official in New York (perhaps America), Robert Moses (18 December 1888 – 29 July 1981), a humanities man, without engineering qualifications, who yet singlehandedly matched the Pharaohs and the Romans in…
Continue Reading →Vale Republican Party Rascal
P.J. O’Rourke, Journalist and satirist (14/11/1947 – 15/2/2022) O’Rourke was once (c. 2009) a guest on the ABC’s Q & A programme, surrounded by the usual suspects. After listening to the various diatribes, he stated a forceful rhetorical question: “Why does the Left assume we’re all as stupid as they are?” His whole life was filled with such sublime bon mots. Read one of his essays, diary notes or other pieces, and you will find a fair bit of wisdom and a hell of a lot of hilarity. (A firm favourite is his ‘book review’ of “Everything to Gain: Making the…
Continue Reading →Don’t Juice Jussie!
The tribulations of Jussie Smollett (Dec. 21) or Faux Victimhood as Heroism (With apologies to Robert Southwell) As he in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow, Surprised he was with sudden heat which which made his heart to glow, And lifting up a fearful eye to view what men came near, Two white supremacists in MAGA hats did then appear; Who, armed with bleach and bearing noose, caused floods of tears to shed As though his floods should quench the flames which with his tears were fed. “Alas,” quoth he, “my Subway sandwich now in snowdrift lies, Though…
Continue Reading →The Long Slide
(By Tucker Carlson) (2021) An anthology of magazine pieces by Carlson, author of the fairly recent Ship of Fools, serves not so much as exhibits for an argument against the decline of journalism; rather, as the author points out in an introduction, they are historical markers from times when political differences were perhaps more nuanced, less toxic and bellicose than our present discontent. Or, to put it another way, it is “a collection of nostalgic writings that underscore America’s long slide from innocence to orthodoxy.” (We’re not so sure about innocence, but still). From abortion issues to cancel culture, from…
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