GSTAAD—For a cultural pessimist such as myself, things have never looked rosier. With economic depression, unemployment, environmental disasters, and endless armed conflicts, modern civilization’s final destruction is nigh. As a prophet of pessimism, I can hardly conceal my glee at being right, but I pray nonstop that I’m wrong. That there’s a cultural decay in a declining West is hardly worth debating. A powerless and ...
Seeing as how man didn’t emerge from the caves until something like 6,000 years ago, thirty-five years is a mere bagatelle in the grand scheme of things. Still, man’s day-to-day folly is always more fun than grand schemes. In September 1976 I went to Torino to buy a Fiat car for my daughter’s mother straight from Fiat’s principal shareholder Gianni Agnelli. He not only gave me a very good price but also had me stay in ...
I flew to Delphi to consult with the oracle, and the old girl had a lot to say about 2012. Pythia, her real name, is getting on in years—she’s around 2,500 years old. Despite her lifestyle—she smokes exotic cheroots, gets high, and then is able to see the future—she still makes sense. Pythia originally earned fame by predicting that Achilles, a supposed immortal, would not make it back from the shores of Troy. When I ...
A reader has registered surprise that I am not an atheist. I am surprised that he’s surprised. Theism, with its vision of an orderly universe and a moral creature created in God’s image, makes sense to scientists far more than the crap peddled by self-promoters such as Dawkins and the recently departed Hitchens. I realize it’s not considered polite to speak ill of the dead, but Christopher Hitchens did it most of the ...
My end-of-the-year Christmas party was the best yet. The festivities began at 10PM and ended somewhat hazily around 6 the next morning. My son JT provided the youth and I provided the gravitas. Actually it was the other way around. I provided the brawn—judo and karate experts—and he provided the artsy-fartsy types from Brooklyn with lotsa pretty girls. Cauliflower brains mixed freely with cauliflower ears. My buddy Michael ...
Let’s start with the bad news: In honor of China’s economic rise, a Chinese-looking woman served as Christmas Grinch here in the States. The sourpuss teacher up in Nanuet ruined the Christmas spirit for a class full of seven- and eight-year-olds when she told them that there is no Santa Claus and that the presents under their trees did not come from the North Pole but were put there by their parents. It’s outrageous that ...
Most of us Westerners are a happy bunch despite our countries being wracked by debt, rising prices, and job losses. Still, I know 4,700 people with no sense of humor whatsoever. I refer to those hardy souls who complained to the BBC concerning on-air remarks about shooting the strikers. What made me laugh out loud was Ed Miliband posing as Labour leader rather than the human biohazard he really is, complaining in his nasal ...
NEW YORK—Today’s protesters could learn something from Sophocles. A man before his time (496-406 BC), Sophocles was a schoolmate of mine, although he was a few years older. Antigone, among his greatest plays, is one that makes us think not only about politics, but also about what sort of ethics drive us to take a stance. If any of you missed it when he first put it on Broadway, here’s how it goes: The two sons of Oedipus ...
In a recent New York Times book review, Henry Kissinger says that according to Dean Acheson, “leaving high office is like the end of a great love affair—a void left by the disappearance of heightened sensibilities and focused concerns.” Dr. K. should know. He is famous for saying that “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” He was a swinger in his younger days and knew quite a few beauties in his time. He then married ...
NEW YORK—I had a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious week—so good, it took a weekend in Connecticut to recover from it. Let’s begin with the Norman Mailer benefit gala. The Mailer Center is an extraordinary achievement only four years following the great man’s death. Larry Schiller, the human battery behind it, has turned Mailer’s Cape Cod house into a young writers’ colony, handing out scholarships and shelter and ...
A recent libel case won by Lady Moore, wife of Sir Roger Moore of James Bond fame, called for my testimony in London, and for once I was happy to oblige. Roger Moore is a friend of very long standing, as is his son Geoffrey, who lives fifty yards away from me in Gstaad. British hacks are notorious for never allowing facts to get in the way of a good story, but in this case the Daily Mail paid dearly for involving the wrong ...
NEW YORK—God, it’s great to be Greek right now. We’ve out-front-paged the Holocaust as well as Iran’s “existential threat” to Israel. (The latter has been jerked up a notch, with Big Bagel papers presenting the Iran “problem” as if it’s 1939 and the Nazis have the bomb.) When the Greek alarm first sounded in mid-2009 in an IMF report, what do you think the elegant Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the towering Sarkozy, ...
NEW YORK—According to Virgil, Libyans are “a people rude in peace and rough in war.” The old boy wrote this a couple thousand years ago, so we have to give him some slack. He was obviously not speaking about the present rabble. As far as I’m concerned, most Libyans are human biohazards. The media have played up their fighting abilities, but it’s all show and boast. Afghanis they are not. The Libyans were the only ...
FORT WORTH, TEXAS—To the best state in the Union for the annual John Randolph Club meeting of true conservatives, hip, hip. No posturing peacocks spouting gibberish learned at university diversity courses here, but witty, juicy, intelligent criticisms of today’s cultural sewer and the part liberals and Christendom’s enemies play in destroying our society. “I disagree with everything you have been saying and doing, you ...
The London Spectator is the oldest weekly magazine of the English-speaking world, a jewel of a magazine as distinguished and respected as it is elegantly written. It was first published in 1828, just as modern Greece became a nation, and in a recent speech the sainted editor remarked that the Speccie was as old as its longest-running columnist, which is yours truly. Graham Greene, no slouch where writing is concerned, called ...
NEW YORK—The morning routine is now a pleasure. Up early, stretch and bend the creaky limbs, hit the coffee, then off to judo and karate. Last week I only managed to get drunk twice, hence there were five such mornings. And what mornings they were. Stolen from summer without the oppressive heat, one crosses the park from east to west, the sun flooding the paths with light, creating long shadows to go along with the tall ...
