August 2007 
The President’s Painted Corner(83)
A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered the war in 1917 because Woodrow Wilson wanted to do so (rightly or wrongly), not because he had to do so.
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Jekyll and Hyde in a Box
Mr. Brooks
Produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios
Directed by Bruce A. Evans
Screenplay by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon
Last month, the Wall Street Journal gleefully doted on billionaire wonderboy Stephen Schwarzman of the aptly named Blackstone Group, a firm dealing in private equities and leveraged buyouts. Schwarzman, George W. Bush’s roommate at Yale and Skull and Bones brother, wished to inform all who cared that, when he pursues a deal, he wants to “inflict pain” and “kill off” his rivals. So there we have it. In American business today, it pays to have murder in your heart. Who can doubt the wisdom of Schwarzman’s lethal intent? He’s a billionaire seven times over. Can’t argue with that.
Letter From Texas: Gott Mit Uns
As modern imperialism grows, even the regions within those countries under its rule become homogenized. Within the subnational regions, smaller ethnic enclaves, with their diverse cultures, tend to take one of two paths. They become tourist traps where the natives are totally ignorant of their own histories, differences, and contributions to the larger groups, until, eventually, everyone wears the same garb (lederhosen, feathered hats, kilts, identical regalia), employs the same false architecture, adopts the same fake accent, sings the same pseudo folk songs, dances the only folk dance he knows, and claims the same beliefs and ideologies. Or they just die out altogether. I don’t know whom this hurts worse—the larger “empire” or the enclaves. It certainly makes the world a duller place. And contrary to the philosophers, knowledge of history is its own virtue.
More in this category
- Social Security’s War on Families: A Current Crisis and a Coming Disaster
- Wall of Sound: Noise as the Basis of Culture
- White Sprinters
- LEISURE, THE BASIS OF CULTURE: August 2007