November 2007
In the Garden
“How’s your garden doing this year?” It’s a familiar question, as normal as the greeting that began the conversation and the goodbye that will end it. I cannot start a conversation with my grandmother, or an aunt or uncle or cousin, without being asked the question within a minute or two—or, depending on the time of year, one of the related questions: “So, are you going to put out a garden this year?” and “How did your garden do?”
Reflections on Immigration Reform
The most significant event of President George W. Bush’s second term (thus far) has been the defeat of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (S.1348). This bill was initiated by President Bush in collaboration with the Democratic congressional majority, over the opposition of the Republicans and a few rebellious Democrats. The real winners of this battle were the usually silent majority of conservative Americans who rose to protest the next wave of illegal-alien invasion, which would have followed the amnesty proposed by S.1348. The subsequent resignation of Bush’s senior Machiavellian, Karl Rove, was not surprising.
At Home Abroad
The Eternal City is home to many eternal things—or, rather, their representatives, among them St. Peter’s, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Capitoline Hill, and the Forum. Nevertheless, on recent travels to Rome, my wife’s and my first visit has been to none of these things, but, instead, to our good friends Asha and Bellamy, who reside on the north side of the Villa Borghese gardens two streets over from Il Ristorante The Meeting—an establishment which, though heavily patronized by Americans and Britons on account of its proximity to the U.S. Embassy on Via Veneto, offers a superb Italian menu and wine list. Our friends are hardly Roman notables or intellectuals, and this estimable restaurant in an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood is not listed in any guidebook I know of.
Materialist Dogmatism
We all know that religious believers are fools who will tell themselves anything to prop up their preconceived notions, while atheists are hard-headed rationalists who look the evidence in the face and follow the Truth no matter the cost. Still, one’s faith in this common narrative of the chattering classes is shaken from time to time. Consider the case of Matthew Parris, a columnist for the London Times who demonstrates the fact that some allegedly rational people are every bit as bull-headedly resistant to the blandishments of empirical evidence as the most hermetically closed-minded geocentrist or six-day creationist.
WANTED! ENEMIES OF THE PLANET
PERSPECTIVE
Wiccan Warming
by Thomas Fleming
Planet-worshiping environmentalists.
VIEWS
Agrarians, Greenies, and Goreites
by Tom Landess
To the next generation.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
by Tobias Lanz
The high environmental cost of too much freedom.
Edward Abbey
by Gregory McNamee
Conservative conservationist—and controversialist.
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