August 2004 
Queen of the Damned(Comments Off)
“What I like best about the Order of the Garter,” Lord Melbourne is reported to have remarked, “is that there is no damned merit about it.” Had the Philadelphia Society existed in Melbourne’s day, he would have found damned little merit in it either, though the society is not on quite the same level of social prestige as the unmeritorious Knights of the Garter.
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Doing Death
We embalm our corpses in order to embalm our minds. Propertius and Horace knew that we can only be fully alive if we are conscious of our mortality and of the brevity of life. That is the point. Post-Christians do not want life, either in the pagan sense of living and fighting and rearing children or in the deeper Christian sense that culminates in the love of God that is immortality.
Dope Nation—August 2004
Thomas Fleming on the reality of death, Doug Bandow on crushing the opium trade in Afghanistan, and Kevin Michael Grace on the American drug industry. Plus, B.K. Eakman on women addicted to tranquilizers and anti-depressants, and Wayne Allensworth on the relationship between the Bush administration and Russian oligarchs.
The Success of the Pod
Norman Podhoretz, Doris Day, and Arnold Palmer were among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on June 23, and it is by no means easy to say who deserves the award the most—or, for that matter, the least. Most people probably were not aware that Miss Day was still alive but were happy to learn she was. The same cannot necessarily be said of Mr. Podhoretz.