Archive for March, 2010

On Dueling, Divorce, and Red Indians

In a society in which every standard is viewed as subject to a notion of progress that is, at root, technological and material, it can be dangerous to characterize fundamental human impulses as primitive or barbarous. Even if they are impulses corrupted by fallen nature, by concupiscence and pride, they remain rooted in our nature and are meant for the good.

Three Cities, Three Empires

Stendahl begins his peculiar autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard, with his alter ego standing at the summit of the Janiculum Hill, surveying the city of Rome, west to east. It is October 16, 1832, and Brulard faces his cinquantaine in three months. Fifty years, he thinks! But Raphael’s Transfiguration has been admired for 250 years already, and better men than he have been dead for centuries.

Going Green for Goldman

What’s behind the cult of “global warming”? We’ve been hearing about it for years on television, in magazines, from politicians, and from certain corporate entities: Mankind is destroying the earth, and the only solution is to “go green.” Unless we radically change our behavior, the oceans will rise, catastrophe will ensue, and that will be the end of life as we know it.

Undemocratic Democrats

According to John Harwood in The New York Times, public support for “reining in Wall Street” has Democrats about as exuberant as Democrats ever get any more. Scared Senate Republicans are looking for deals to cut. The public wants this thing, with three-fifths supporting it in a recent poll. Democrats—who always do the public’s bidding—are ready to close the deal.

The Properties of Property

If you read libertarians, classical liberals, and their intellectual godfather John Locke, you might believe that they are the great defenders of property rights. After all Locke and his followers have always championed the rights of life, liberty, and property. How strange it is, then, that so many (not all certainly) modern libertarians have also argued for a mother’s right to kill her baby and the right of the Federal Government to take away liberty from local communities that have passed ordinances that one or another moral anarchist dislikes.

A Republican Is Someone Who Thinks . . .

*That unemployment compensation for laid-off workers is socialism and multibillion-dollar bailouts for banking and stock swindlers is capitalism.

*That killing women and children with high explosives in remote corners of the earth is defending “our way of life.”

Who Should Pay the Piper?

Greece this past weekend saw the worst rioting since the debt crisis began. After Athens had announced new tax hikes and budget cuts to reduce a deficit of 13 percent of gross domestic product, mobs drove guards from Greece’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and attacked police.

Reporting and Deciding

A review of The Hurt Locker (produced by First Light Production and Kingsgate Films; directed by Kathryn Bigelow; screenplay by Mark Boal; distributed by Summit Entertainment).

At last we have a movie that makes us feel the full obscenity of the Iraq war. Other films have been well intentioned but have either given in to the temptation to preach (Lions for Lambs) or taken aim at the wrong targets (In the Valley of Elah and Redacted). The Hurt Locker takes an entirely different tack.

Sachs of Gold

The story thus far: Not content with plunging the world’s economy into the worst crisis since the 30’s, the avaricious and reckless bankers have been saved from ruin—momentarily—by our taxes, yet they continue to treat us with breathtaking contempt. Far from feeling any remorse or humility, they pay themselves annual bonuses larger than what most people earn in their lifetime, and do so with an arrogance that beggars belief.

Little Bitty Pretty One

The television screen shows five-year-old Tara being awakened from a sound sleep at 6 a.m. She has a beauty pageant to get ready for. To shake off her sluggishness she is given a carb-rich donut and some caffeine-loaded Mountain Dew.

After “breakfast” Tara is dressed in a two-piece bathing suit and taken to a makeshift tent, where she endures a spray-on tan. After that, it is, as her mother says, “magic time.” Powder is applied to Tara’s face, along with rouge, lipstick, lip gloss, eyeshadow, and false eyelashes.