Last week in this space I was grossly unfair to a vast swathe of our country, one of America’s most hard-working and patriotic regions. In mocking the Midwest as humorless—indeed, affectless—I surely offended many thousands of my fellow citizens. And I did it without thinking, or considering the effect my words might have. That is what’s so great about writing … [Read More]

Someday I’d like to meet Monsieur Tourette, and ask him about his syndrome. Because over the years I’ve had close friends, colleagues, mentors, siblings and girlfriends suggest—sometimes quite tactfully—that I must suffer from this condition. Nothing else could explain why I said the things I did, in the contexts where I said them. “I mean,” a childhood friend explained with warm … [Read More]

“Do you think you could turn the volume down on that war game you’re playing so I can least pretend that you’re listening to me?” So my beloved asked, very sweetly, in her slight Dallas twang. What could I say? “Why sure, Sweetie. Just a second…. Okay, what were you saying?” Of course, she was saying something amazingly feminine, about the … [Read More]

The anniversaries passed with little fanfare in America. No nation really likes to remember its crimes. Stories appeared about the bombings in the German and Japanese press—though both nations feel honor-bound to place them in the context of fascist atrocities which provoked them. But with a few exceptions, the American press has done little to remind us what Allied bombers … [Read More]

So there I was at the 21 Club, eating raw meat with The Gun Lady….   That was the best journalistic lede I ever wrote—and it never saw print. My editor at a second-tier business paper snipped it right out of the profile I’d done of a high-powered female gun rights activist on Capitol Hill. This large-caliber dowager (she’d dubbed herself … [Read More]

There’s nothing to shake your residual faith in journalists than to see a news report of an event in which you took part, or read a media account of yourself (especially a friendly one that unwittingly links you to the sort of person you’ve spent your life opposing). But a column by Andrew Kohut in Tuesday’s New York Times in praise … [Read More]

This essay is the second installment in a three-part symposium on sovereignty. The first contribution was made by Thomas E. Woods Jr.. Every time I read an anarchist essay like Tom Woods’s piece on sovereignty, in which he implicitly calls for the abolition of the State, it fills me with a warm, nostalgic glow. Some 25 years ago, I was active … [Read More]

If it weren’t for the Internet, I’d never have met the woman I love…or needed to call in the Canadian Mounties to fend off a cyber-stalker who tried to steal my identity. Technology enabled me to spend several thousand bucks, over the years, on plane and train fare for dates with total strangers.   But it also meant I’d never have … [Read More]

What did I learn from 8.5 years of graduate school in Creative Writing and English? Apart from useful stuff like how to structure a commercial screenplay, I realized that literature departments are where bad ideas go to die. That’s what I read between the lines of Russell Jacoby’s recent lament in the Chronicle of Higher Education:   How is it that … [Read More]

I’ve never been one for ruthless consistency. I learned young the fine art of emotional doublethink, from the experience of being at one and the same time:   An orthodox Catholic who mentally assented to official Church teaching on sexuality, according to its 1917 formulation in the old Catholic Encyclopedia.   A teenage boy.   You needn’t read James Joyce to … [Read More]