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by James Bowman
In politics as in so much else what you have to say depends on where — and with whom — you have to stand. Everyone has a point of view, and the political process is all about creating constituencies for particular points of view. But the media doesn’t believe in the necessity of these ordinary and universal contingencies. They have their own sort of universalism instead. Because, that is, of their self-conceit as being above what they scornfully call "partisanship," they imagine that there is one point of view that doesn’t come from a particular place on the political spectrum but all points and none. It is, as it were, God’s point of view, sub specie aeternitatis, and they fondly suppose that it is easy to adopt as their own. This is, of course, patently false, but the pretense that it is true lies behind much of what appears in the media, masquerading as news. by James Bowman
In olden times, revolutions used to start among the potentially revolutionary classes with the idea that the king or, as it might be, the czar was being ill-served by his advisors. Dangerous and corrupt figures — sometimes nobles, sometimes agents, sometimes royal family members, especially if they were of foreign origin — must have been getting between the monarch and his people, so that the former could not hear what was troubling the latter, and offer redress of their grievances. The assumption, of course, was that the king or czar himself really loved his people and was concerned for their welfare, but that those who were close to him had to have been preventing him from doing the right thing, which he must otherwise want to do as a matter of course. It was only a first phase, as I say. Before long, anger at the king’s men — or women — was likely to spill over into anger at the king himself, who had then to look to his crown.
Has any novelist been as gifted with so many earnest critics trying to rehabilitate his terminal talent and grant him the benefit of every artistic doubt than Philip Roth? For a man obsessed with a loss of ability—sexual, literary and otherwise—his greatest insight into the ravages of old age seems to be his self-exampled imperviousness to being called out for pap. A characteristic case of this indulgence is Judith Shulevitz’s all-too-kind review of The Humbling, Roth’s latest installment in what he’s labeled a “quartet” of nocturne emissions. Should we consider it a sign of courage in a critic who, by novel’s end, is not able to decipher if what she’s just read is an unholy mess or not? Where are the Purple Hearts? Some Truths About Fort Hood by Roger Kimball | from Pajamas Media
Twelve solders and one civilian army employee were massacred by Maj. Nidal Hasan, an army psychiatrist, on November 5 at Ft. Hood, Texas. Maj. Hasan injured another thirty people, some critically, before being shot himself by the local police. Will the soldiers whom Hasan killed or injured in this latest terrorist assault receive the Purple Heart? In [...]
It takes a certain type of personality to spend a cold Moscow night alone with Anna Akhmatova in a state of total chastity and reserve. Then again, Isaiah Berlin saved all the good dirt for his own scholarly reputation, which, despite the best revisionist efforts, was quite middling and saved from the enormous condescension of posterity only by the rhetorical pyrotechnics and parlor charm of its holder. That extremely talented profile artist, Evan Goldstein, does his best to show the “no, wait!” side of this long-running dispute as to Berlin’s intellectual talents in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A few shrewd insights into Zionism and a handy guide to Russian humanists, perhaps? (In my opinion, his best essay was on Marx and Disraeli, the pole stars of 19th century “exception” Jews.) But apart from a useful apothegm about foxes and hedgehogs, which belonged to the Greek poet Archilochus, and a less useful dichotomy between “negative” and “positive” liberties, which located the happy political middle-ground as being somewhere between Ayn Rand and Stalin, what has Berlin left us except for so many friends, so many letters and so many admirable summaries of what greater men have thought and done? Strengthening the Special Relationship by Roger Kimball | from Pajamas Media
There are two planks to Obama’s foreign policy. One is the presumption that America is in the wrong. Hence Obama’s habit, as he travels around the world, of apologizing for America. The whole idea of “American exceptionalism,” he has explained, is wrong. If America is “exceptional,” it is only in the sense that every [...] by Roger Kimball | from Pajamas Media
Every phone call. Every email. Every text message. Every web site visited. I land at Heathrow and discover that Big Brother in England will be recording it all: the entire electronic career of every private citizen will salted away for a year in a gigantic database and “available for monitoring by government bodies.” Six-hundred [...] by James Bowman
A few days ago, there appeared in the London Daily Telegraph an article by Jeff Randall that fell into the class of journalistic screed that the British call the "Why-oh-why?" article. Mr Randall had, along with many others in the British media, seized upon the much publicized arrest of a drunken student for urinating upon some memorial poppies, ubiquitous in Britain at this time of year, as a reason for thinking that modern Britain itself can be characterized by, in the words of the article’s headline, "No respect, no morals, no trust." It wasn’t, thought Mr Randall, just the failure of reverence for the glorious dead, but a more general sort of disrespect that shows up even in the propensity of demoralized Britons to litter. by Roger Kimball | from Pajamas Media
Today, November 9, 2009, marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Looking back, it is difficult not to feel a celebratory thrill: if the Berlin Wall was a sort of objective correlative of Communist tyranny — the perfect architectural summary of its soul-blighting aspirations — its dramatic fall seemed like a [...] by Roger Kimball | from Pajamas Media
Yesterday, in the dead of night, the U.S. House of Representatives took a small step for Nancy Pelosi and a giant step for despotism. Freedom, David Hume famously observed, is seldom lost all at once. More often, it leaks out slowly. The petty tyranny of good intentions colludes with the bureaucratic imperative to stymie individual initiative [...] |
About ArmaVirumque ( AHR-mah wih-ROOM-kweh) In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age.
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