THOSE OF YOU who know me only through these sometimes-prickly writings of mine — which is to say you don’t know me at all — may be surprised by my claim that I’m as a rule a docile and muted and even agreeable fellow. I’m provoked now and again — and the yearly occurrence of Black Friday is one of those occasions. I don’t much care for this late, absurd, and phony non-event, which promotes the rotten and rot-inducing ideas that our highest calling subsists in being a consumer, and that everything depends upon one’s subservience to this duty.
Monthly Archives: November 2011
Following the Money: Why Are the Feds Spying on Cindy Blackstock?
Herman Cain and the Lessons of Bill Clinton
UPON FIRST encountering him in 1992, I detected on the Arkansas governor and would-be President an unpleasant aroma. Even now I am astonished by the high regard of the man’s verbal performances, which have always struck my ears as maudlin and second-rate. Before William Jefferson Clinton, in the parade of the over-rated and “charismatic,” we find that other infamous liberal womanizer, Mr. John Fitzgerald Camelot: and now it appears we have added to this gross patrilineage the former Mr. Godfather, Herman Cain.
Living in the Age of The Endless War
ON A WALL at the National Capital’s War Monument are inscribed these words, past which I walk each day and derived from the ninth book of Virgil’s Aeneid: “nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo.” Here I shall provide some context, deferring to Robert Fitzgerald’s 1983 translation for Random House:
Fortunate, both! If in the least my songs
Avail, no future day will ever take you
Out of the record of remembering Time,
While children of Aeneas make their home
Around the Capitol’s unshaken rock,
And still the Roman Father governs all.
As Tibet Burns
I‘LL WAGER that you weren’t informed of it by the media, but it happens that yesterday was the Global Day of Action undertaken by the International Campaign for Tibet. I was on Parliament Hill in Ottawa when a large crowd assembled and marched down Elgin Street in a desperate effort to raise awareness here in Canada of China’s official policy of slow-motion genocide.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 