Our recent sightseeing-hiking excursion to the west coast began in slack-jawed wonder while beholding yet again the stunning northern California redwoods, which are ever so old, but simply never get old. We proceeded from there to a deservedly renowned Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon, after which we piled another tall trees experience onto the trip through the conifer forests surrounding Olympia, Washington. It was not till the last of those, while picking my way through an impossibly tangled old forest with giant happy evergreens, downed trees at every conceivable angle and stage of decay, and hip-high ferns sprawling over each…
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When I returned to gym work a few months ago after an extended hiatus dating from the pandemic era that saw me get creative in doing all such exercise outdoors, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before in Gym Culture, Male Locker Room Division. On pretty much every visit since my return, I observe young men from perhaps 16-25 or so stroll up to the nearest mirror, roll up their sleeves or take off their shirt, and proceed to flex their muscles and preen for several minutes at a time, striking various poses while slowly completing a few 360-degree pirouettes. Sometimes…
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So it turns out that the figure of the “strongman” is ascendant once again in contemporary history. Putin in Russia, Xi Ping in China, Kim (Jong Un) in North Korea, Erdogan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Mohammed (bin Salman) in Saudi Arabia, Bukele in El Salvador. And of course Trump here in the United States as a kind of wannabe dictator who openly admires others on that list and often muses on dreams of becoming one of them. What unites all these men is a fierce desire to govern by the exertion of their own will, along with disdain for…
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Has there been a stranger, more cataclysmic turn of events in recent American history than what we have been witnessing since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump just six dizzying weeks ago? It brings to mind the quote of unknown origin but frequently misattributed to Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” The failed assassination, remarkable for many reasons including that it is almost completely out of the news now, marked the beginning of multiple events that have changed virtually every dynamic of the 2024 presidential race. Until then, the campaign had resembled…
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William F. Buckley was always one of those conservatives it was good for liberals to keep abreast of. Liberal arguments for an expansive government role in American life had to go through Buckley’s mixture of cultured intellectual gravitas, take-no-prisoners debate skills and slightly mischievous humor, all of which made for a formidable presence across the American cultural landscape in the second half of the 20th century. Buckley died in 2008 at age 82, less than a year after Pat, his socialite wife of 56 years, passed on and left him desolate. He died, however, in the wake of a life…