As we watch Gordon Brown prepare to follow Tony Blair’s path into the sands of Levantine catastrophe, I am led to reflect on Blair’s lasting legacy for Britain. To be sure, there is much rich material to choose from. Memories of his early years in office flood the mind—his demented smile, for instance, which never failed to remind one of a … [Read More]

On 18 August 2007 at 10:30 P.M., my brother Andre, writer-documentary-maker Ed Canfield, and I led a candlelight procession of some 50 people down Selma Avenue in Hollywood , California . The cavalcade wended its three block-long way from an establishment called The Piano Bar to an office building inhabited by an outfit called “Five Star Video,” at 1555 Cassil Place … [Read More]

Writing a check or coming up with cash is a vital liturgical deed in the root meaning of liturgy, a work done by people on behalf of the larger community. Roger Cardinal Mahony Gather Faithfully Together, September 4, 1997   As all the world knows, in a last-ditch-albeit-successful effort to avoid the presence of my father-in-God, Roger Cardinal Mahony, on the … [Read More]

July 21 marks the 146th anniversary of the beginning of the First Manassas (or First Bull Run, in Yankese). On that day, Washington citizens went out to the battlefield a-picnicking, to watch the onslaught of the Confederates under General Beauregard. While it was a victory for the South, a number of considerations (including the exhaustion of his men, and the early … [Read More]

Back during the Roaring ‘20s, a then-contemporary witticism had it that four institutions would prevent the takeover of Europe by Communism: the German General Staff, the British House of Lords, the Academie Française, and the Holy See. Eighty years have brought many changes, to be sure. On the one hand, Communism is as unlikely to remerge in Europe as Fascism or … [Read More]

When I was a boy, back in the 1960s and 70s, the big news of the day was the Vietnam War. It went on and on, occasionally making house-calls when someone from the office would come into our class and take a student away. We always knew what that meant—the student in question had lost a brother over there. But one … [Read More]

I recently completed a visit to Massachusetts with two definable goals: to escort an aged friend to his 65th reunion from Harvard, and to deliver the commencement address at a high school graduation. Although I was born in New York (and consider myself a native New Yorker, of sorts), and have lived in the Los Angeles area since I was six, … [Read More]