I feel funny about the old lady, Miss Liberty, or Miss US of A, whatever you wish to call the United States, once upon a time THE No. 1 in everyone’s books. The country looks ancient and worn, with corruptive wealth having become an obsession in the republic. Consumers have obliterated idealists, the latter now the butt of jokes in corporate rooms. The culture is too impressed by fame and fortune; materialism is so deeply entrenched that it applies even to the way people use words. We have the wrong people on top showing the rest of the peasants the way. Some fool wrote a long, boring ...
“Blue-eyed white devils” are not very popular nowadays. At least not with a recent migrant thrown off an airline flight for calling his fellow travelers thus. The man was drunk, or he might have ...
A well-dressed gentleman in New York today looks like a shadowy figure in a sepia-colored old photograph. I’ve been here for two weeks and have yet to see anyone wearing a suit and tie, except when ...
Back in the good old days when the Brits ruled the roost in the American colonies, the sneaky Brits used a system of their own to lord it over those who looked like them, spoke ...
He has the appearance of a startled vulture, a sort of prefab mannerism, but he’s all greed and preening self-importance. Selfishness is his holy grail, and he’s a lying, ...
I’ve never had much use for diplomats, nor did my father, who called them gigolos and freeloaders living high on the hog off taxpayers like him. “Except for George Kennan,” ...
Of all the lovely things and habits that Big Tech has deprived humans of by turning us into electronic robots, the one I miss the most is the love letter. Those sleepy types who ...
I recently watched a Swedish movie, 1939, as good a film as I’ve seen in years, with a beautiful young blonde as the heroine, and with none of those boring Bergman silences that ...
“She” strangles a cat, then dissects it and shreds what is left. “She” then hits a man with a bottle, strangles him, and finally drowns him. “She” calls herself ...
The late ’60s and early ’70s were great years for yours truly. Sporting successes in tennis and karate, a great president in the White House, and some good reporting from Hue ...
Things ain’t looking that good. Nothing seems to be working in the so-called free world: rubbish in the streets, vandalism and violent crime, illegal immigration at record ...
I’m back scribbling about writing again because penmanship is like cocaine—once you start it’s difficult to stop. Disaffection is my customary response to contemporary ...
If it weren’t for Papa Hemingway’s machismo, or Scott Fitzgerald’s lovely prose, Somerset Maugham would have been my favorite writer. And one of the things I most regret is ...
I read somewhere that Saint Kitts and Nevis, thriving democracies somewhere south of Miami Beach, are demanding reparations from the Brits because the bad old English owned slaves ...
The massacre in Gaza has shoved the Ukraine war aside, which is just as well for Zelensky, who canceled the election he was about to lose and has outlawed rival political parties ...
The magical embroidery of memory is not involved in this one: I remember it as if it were yesterday, despite something like sixty years having gone by. I had had dinner at El ...