Who was the first to declare that nothing counts a lot and very little counts at all? The cynic and sesquipedalian Alastair Forbes claimed it, but he spoke with a forked tongue. Iris Murdoch hinted that it was hers, but she, too, was known for bending the truth. Either way, the saying is utter crap. A hell of a lot counts, starting with the fine line between mad love and pure madness. Don’t be alarmed—I will not go into yet ...

Briefly home from boarding school back in 1951, I went to a bar with a phony draft card, ordered a beer, and watched Rocky Marciano knock out my idol Joe Louis. Joe was 37 and trying for a comeback, as he was broke—and as he sat in his stool after having been counted out, he looked a lot older. Rocky crossed over from his corner, bent down to speak to Joe, and began to cry. Joe was his idol, too. Rocky went on to become world ...

When the bloated and declawed Las Vegas casino-money recipient Newt Gingrich had some fun recently over Mitt Romney's ability to speak a few words of French, Europeans took notice of this farce. The French are an angry nation: envious, supercilious, and eager to show superiority over those who invented Coca-Cola and the Big Mac. They are also forgetful, especially their amnesia regarding Uncle Sam's military forays to save la ...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in this here mag about Syria. I played it safe. My point was that Assad was not as bad as what may come after him. I now know better. In the long sweep of history, those who play it safe are more often than not wrong. Here's a tip: If you want to get it right, choose the side Uncle Sam and the Fourth Estate see as a villain, and presto, you"€™ve chosen the good guy. Assad did not start this in ...

GSTAAD—It’s early in the silvery morning light as I look out my window up here in the heights. A batallion of wispy white clouds hides behind the surrounding mountains—a reminder that a perfect dawn makes for a perfect day’s skiing. The clouds play games. They wrap themselves around the peaks like snowcaps and then are chased away by the sun, only to return. Someone once compared the movement of ice to a soul’s ...

I was sad to read that the Attikon Cinema on Stadiou Street in central Athens was burned down by anarchist scum pretending to protest against the EU Nazis. The Attikon was built in 1870 as part of a beautiful, ocher-colored neoclassical edifice constructed by a German architect, only to be torched 142 years later by professional troublemakers posing as freedom defenders. It's par for the times to burn down an old beautiful ...

Who is worse—the pusher or the addict? I’d say it’s fifty-fifty as they sustain each other, although the addict has the moral high ground. Greece is the addict. The German and French banks are the pushers, with Brussels the Godfather shipping the stuff in from Afghanistan. The Godfather is not the cuddly Brando type, but rather an autocoprophagous degenerate who managed a coup d’etat while Europe slept. The Godfather is ...

GSTAAD—Here I go again! I hear music and there’s no one there I smell blossoms and the trees are bare All day long I seem to walk on air…. Some of you must be getting rather tired of this, but I simply can’t help it. I swear on the Bible I’m not doing it on purpose. I dropped in on the terribly nice village doctor although I knew it was a total waste of our time. His diagnosis, as always with such symptoms: There is ...

As I watched last week’s Western posturing after the Russo-Chinese veto of the UN Security Council’s resolution against Syria, Captain Renault of Casablanca fame kept coming to mind. Like the good captain, who was shocked to discover gambling was taking place at Rick’s Café (while pocketing his winnings), I was shocked that Uncle Sam’s Secretary of State and her British equivalent were so upset that the big bad Russkis ...

At ten minutes past four on the afternoon of April 28, 1945, a plumber named Moretti shot and killed a prematurely aged man and a youngish woman who was not wearing any underwear in front of the Villa Belmonte near Lake Como. Next to Moretti—who was later tried for theft and other misdeeds—was one Colonel Valerio, whose submachine gun had jammed while he was trying to shoot the defenseless couple. Millions of words have ...

GSTAAD—OK, sports fans! The Davos irrelevance is over, Gstaad is covered with the white stuff, and in St. Moritz the Russian crooks are making a Stalingrad-like siege on the town’s ultra-expensive boutiques. Let’s start with Davos, where publicity-seeking Shylocks such as George Soros pretended to be against income inequality. What phonies these bums are, just as bad as the Occupy protesters but with two or three private ...

It wasn’t Italy’s finest hour. Not even Gabrielle D’Annunzio—poet, patriot, propagandist, and proto-fascist—could spin this into a maritime Titanic-like drama. Once the Costa Concordia hit a rock off the Tuscan coast, the passengers and crew acted like cowards. This much we know. But knowing Italy—a country that successfully switched sides in both World Wars—the truth will never emerge. Human nature’s eternal ...

Edmund Wilson was America’s premier man of letters during the middle of the 20th century. The Wound and the Bow, To the Finland Station, and Memoirs of Hecate County are still in print, as are his journals about the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. He was a literary critic par excellence, a friend of both Scott Fitzgerald (whose death at 44 shook him greatly, as Wilson was only a year older) as well as Hemingway, who counted Wilson as ...

GSTAAD—“Mick Flick Invites you to the Roaring Twenties,” read the black-and-white invitation card. A flapper and a Rudolph Valentino type in white tie and tails flirted in the old-fashioned manner—she dreamlike, fluttering her eyes upward, he looking swarthy and passionate while standing over her. In the background, a roomful of swells tripped the light fantastic. It is rare for a party to live up to expectations, ...

GSTAAD—By the time you read this it will be mid-January and all your New Year’s resolutions will have gone the way of good manners. At least I hope so. Resolutions can be dangerous to one’s health and a hazard to one’s happiness. Here in snow-covered Gstaad—we’ve had more snow than there’s cocaine in South America—the green monster of envy has reared its hideous face. Of the seven deadly sins, I only recognize ...

When I was last in the Big Bagel (as I call Noo Yawk), a policeman who’d been awarded countless commendations for bravery over 22 years of front-line service was allegedly murdered in cold blood by a black drug dealer. Officer Peter Figoski was 47 and had raised his four daughters on his own. His last act of duty was to respond to a robbery in Brooklyn, where the fleeing black thug reputedly shot him in the face. The accused, ...