thoughts in and out of season
While visiting the Metropolitan Museum this past weekend we wandered through one of the galleries devoted to French painters of the post-Revolutionary period. It looks like they mostly wanted a return to normalcy. Hence Ingres’ portraits of extremely self-possessed and incredibly well-tended notables and their wives. All the storms in the world couldn’t affect … More ...
I found the to-do over the New York Post “chimp” cartoon unbelievably depressing.
The idea that there are all those racists out there is extremely useful to some people. It explains why black people have problems and our rulers have the right to rule us. They are, after all, morally superior, and the rest of … More ...
What we see around us, and my last entry points to, is a perfect storm of compulsory unreason:
At a friend’s suggestion I watched a bit of the Lehrer News Hour last night. He had a couple of think-tank types on, a guy from the Rand Corporation and a lady from somewhere or other, who were saying we had to show everyone we had a commitment to stay in Afghanistan for the long … More ...
My excellent American adventure continues with George M. Marsden’s The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief—not the whole book, but enough to get the picture.
In Marsden’s telling, American colleges were originally designed to serve both a public and a religious purpose. That worked well enough: the social order … More ...
I just finished (more or less) another book on my Americana reading list, Bill Kauffman’s Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. It’s a straightforward book that uses lots of examples to make the obvious points that conservative locally-minded people mostly don’t like foreign adventures, and that war … More ...
To follow up on recent discussions of America and Americanism I’ve been reading a couple of books: Tom Woods’ The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era and T. J. Jackson Lears’ No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 . Both are well-written, well-informed, and well worth a … More ...
I’ve left something out of the first two pieces. When people speak of love, loyalty or hatred for America they don’t just mean America as land and people, together with whatever human connections happen to join them. They mean America as a substantive moral unity, as a sort of personality. Otherwise they wouldn’t talk so … More ...
I’ve said what I like about America. But what do I dislike?
Here again it’s hard to avoid cliche and attitudinizing. People have been hating America for a long time. It hasn’t done them much good or shown them to advantage.
On the whole, my dislikes are the flip side of my likes.
I don’t … More ...
What do I like and dislike about America?
It’s hard to comment. It’s like asking what I think about life, or the world. What do I like and dislike about 300,000,000 people from every conceivable background spread out over the better part of a continent?
And compared to what? Most of what’s good and bad … More ...
