Hunphrey Bogart as Sam Spade

Modernism, especially in architecture, is bleak and sterile and incomprehensible and a panacea for the talentless and the phony. Urban architecture that draws on the decorative style of previous eras is beauty personified, whereas functionalism, as the gimmick is called nowadays, is the very stuff that has made architects and city planners turn their backs on what makes a city beautiful and livable. And speaking of modern life, the takeover by the Internet has sealed our fate, and it’s not for the better. Porn is king, but leave it to the New York Times to run a major article debating whether porn has an influence on the young. How can anyone debate this? Well, if you saw what some of the people who work there look like, you might well ask the same question. What David Cameron called “the corrosion of childhood” is a fact to anyone who recognizes the difference between day and night, but porn is very, very big business and I don’t give a damn what neuroscience tells us. Young people exposed to porn are malleable to extreme behavior, and teens need protection from the porn merchants of not only the Internet, but of Hollywood and the TV networks.

Last week a great American hero died at 89, rear admiral Jeremiah A. Denton Jr., the pilot who while being interviewed as a POW blinked in Morse the word “torture,” signaling to the Jane Fondas of this world that the little men in black pajamas did not exactly play by the rules. He spent seven years in a tiny cell, but his greatest disappointment once back home was the failure of morality among Americans. No modernist he.