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Class War? Not Yet
On the October 14, 2005 Diane Rehm Show “Friday News Roundup,” David Corn of The Nation complained that the Administration’s policy to rebuild New Orleans as a tourist town would permanently exclude many of the locals. Policy Review editor and Hoover Institution fellow Todd Lindberg rebutted, “Most of those people are the product of a…
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Temporary Life 1: The Lying Debutant
During the recession of the late ’80s and early ’90s, big businesses were suffocating in their own fat, bloated from non-performance-related capital the Reagan Administration had funneled from public coffers in the form of deregulation, tax cuts and corporate welfare. As these companies were actually failing and realized that they would have to practice economy…
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High-tech Poetry Bitch
They had big dictums, deep erudition and cunning linguistics. Marianne Moore translated La Fontaine’s easygoing French into an English of conspicuous difficulty. In Pound’s hands the rudimentary Italian of the troubadours and bare-bones Chinese of Confucius became abstruse Victorianese. TS Eliot gave us the musical equivalent of thought—or sonorous obscurity. William Carlos Williams gave us…
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Indignant or Asinine?
It is the inalienable right of the individual to publicly demonstrate a feeling. No authority can prohibit it, no civil institution can enforce it. It’s simply a right we all have and exercise as a matter of personal choice. While infants, dogs and lunatics exercise this right in the form of enthusiasm, affection, amusement, frustration…
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Self-Reliance: An Exorbitant Delusion
If anything in this essay reflects badly on Empirican white-collar culture, I do not absolve myself of hypocrisy. On the contrary, I admit that I have practically benefited from that culture and, rightly or wrongly, feel no gratitude. After all, should a work of cultural criticism, which intends neither to eulogize nor instruct, be apologetic…
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Cars and the Power Cult
I’m going to get me a carAnd I’ll be heading on down the roadThen I won’t have to worryAbout that broken-down, ragged Ford —Chuck Berry, “No Money Down” The automobile is the Empire’s most popular machine. As the name of this machine indicates, it is a means of self-mobility, which is the Empire’s most popular…