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The Right Word
Oh, my do lovers of language love images! They should. Images—word pictures—enlighten, enliven, entertain. Tight as a tick; drunk as a lord; ugly as a mud fence. See what I mean? The reader doesn’t merely read; he sees.
You probably think an attack on cliches—images worn down like a mill stone—is about to ensue. Not today. That’s for later. I want instead to say a few words about words that don’t exactly match each other when linked, theoretically, in image form.
The Disemboweling of America
Though Bush 41 and Bush 43 often disagreed, one issue did unite them both with Bill Clinton: protectionism.
Globalists all, they rejected any federal measure to protect America’s industrial base, economic independence or the wages of U.S. workers.
Are Obama and Hillary Clinton Really Bumblers?
Are they really bumblers? The opinion columns quiver with reproofs for maladroit handling of foreign policy by President Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Those who cherished foolish illusions that Obama’s election presaged a substantive shift to the left in foreign policy fret about “worrisome signs” that this is not the case.
On Dueling, Divorce, and Red Indians
In February 1861, Joseph Sadoc Alemany, the first Roman Catholic bishop of the state of California, wrote an urgent pastoral letter to his flock. This letter was published immediately in the New York Freeman’s Journal, and for this indiscretion its editor was imprisoned for a year in Fort Lafayette, and his presses were shut down. Archbishop Alemany was a Dominican, born in Spain, who pursued his calling in Italy and in Kentucky (where his Dominican brethren had imparted the foundations of classical learning to the young Jeff Davis) before being named bishop of California by Pius IX.
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. From the Gianicolo he can pick out Castel Gandolfo, the Villa Aldobrandini, and the white form of Castel San Pietro. At his feet below the slope lie orange trees planted by the Capuchins. Beyond the Tiber, he spies the Priory of Malta and the Pyramid of Cestius; at a greater distance, Santa Maria Maggiore and the long lines of the Palazzo di Monte Cavallo.
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.
If there’s time, that is, after Congress and the president force the public to take a deal on health care that only a distinct minority seems to want.
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. But, since the liberals/ libertarians adore money, surely they are a bastion of support for property rights against Marxists and other would-be confiscators.
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.
In our own country, students, teachers and administrators at UC-Berkeley held a “Strike and Day of Action to Defend Education” to demand more money from taxpayers—for themselves.
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