The governance, or lack thereof, of the great republic.
The commemoration of any great tragedy is a thorny proposition. Pay it too little attention, and you are open to charges of ignoring the pain of the victims and the grief of the survivors; pay it too much attention, and you become vulnerable to accusations of exploitation and devaluation. This …
It’s hard to write anything like this without seeming to endorse a second term for Barack Obama. This is difficult for me to do, since I’ve generally found Obama to be a Clintonian disappointment; he’s squandered one political opportunity after another, bowed down before the G.O.P. with barely a struggle, …
It’s Labor Day in America. Celebrating what Adam Smith called “the first price, the original purchase that was paid for all things” has always been an iffy proposition in this most capitalist of countries. In fact, the very commemoration of Labor Day here in the U.S. was sped along by …
From Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. The British fought the war for four years and three months. Its potential of ironic meaning, considered not now in relation to the complacencies of the past but in itself alone, emerges when we consider its events chronologically. The last five …
I’m kicking off a week of Deep Reads, in hopes of jumping back in the habit of reading books, which I’ve fallen out of for the last couple of months. Regular content — including, I promise, new Sandwich Century entries — will resume next week. From Fred Halliday’s 100 Myths …
So everyone is bitching and moaning that the awesome new debt ceiling deal is going to be bad for the economy. Liberals are all running around saying that Obama went all Cave Carson on the deal, and that all the austerity measures, which are totally necessary because America doesn’t have …
So, because I am a self-hating jerk, I was flitting around a bunch of the right-blogs yesterday, to see what horrifying inhumane garbage they had to say about the Norway slaughter. And one of the most common threads, especially at Ace of Spades and Confederate Yankee, was a variant of …
Occasionally, I’d like to share somewhat longer excerpts from things I’ve read and been impressed by than my usual slender quote-of-the-day offerings. Here’s the first, from Hannah Arendt’s Essays in Understanding 1930-1954: “In trying to understand what were the real motives which caused people to act as cogs in the …
1. Playing competitive basketball 2. Attending the University of Hawaii 3. Attending Hawaii Pacific University 4. Attending North Idaho College 5. Competing in beauty pageants 6. Attending Matanuska-Susitna College 7. Working as a sports reporter 8. Working as a sports broadcaster 9. Serving on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation …
Nobody has suffered today like I have suffered today, unless they also read the entirety of the shitty Libertarian webcomic Roswell, Texas by L. Neil Smith. Allow me to share with you some of its insouciant crappiness in the form of a list. 1. The comic is set in an …
Osama bin-Laden is dead. Everyone is supposed to have an opinion about every aspect of how that sentence came to awarded the status of truth, and I guess I do, but I’ll be damned if I can sort it out into anything worth saying. Mostly, I feel a combination of …
Over at the National Review, they’ve given idiot-at-large Jay Nordlinger a column called “Impromptus”, in which he jots down his half-formed mental emissions. As with most such random-thoughts columns, you get what you pay for. Let’s watch! It was interesting to read Kate Trinko’s piece on Michele Bachmann and learn …
So, here is something you might want to consider the next time someone tells you about how times are tight, and there’s a need for “shared sacrifice”, and we need to get rid of “entitlements” like Medicare, unemployment extensions, and Social Security hikes. It’s something you might want to remember …
In the interests of fairness, and to placate those who felt yesterday’s column was a bit unfair, today we’re going to discuss America’s favorite hobby: dropping bombs on Middle Eastern countries. While it’s sometimes proven slightly controversial — although not so controversial that pretty much every post-war president hasn’t done …
Poor President Obama did his best to avoid bombing a Middle Eastern country, but when he fell off the wagon, he fell off it hard. Sending in the Navy cruisers and the fighter jets represents the laziest, most thoughtless form of response to any kind of diplomatic crisis; it’s what …
