Spectator Life

In 2019, I wrote a piece for the American Conservative reflecting on the Notre-Dame fire and on the meaning of that cathedral in a secular age. At the time, I considered donating my paycheck from that article to the rebuilding effort. I’m glad I didn’t. I certainly wasn’t the only one moved to devote some of my hard-earned money to saving one of the jewels of Christendom. Over €800 million poured in from around the world. €165 million was quickly spent restoring the edifice’s structural integrity. But over €600 million remained, and soon the architects descended. After an initial flurry of mostly outlandish proposals that aimed to modernize the building’s exterior, the French government caved to popular outrage and ditched the design contest.

“Republicans can and must become the party of parents.” So said Congressman Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, in an Election Day missive as CNN and MSNBC propagandists hurled racial vitriol at Virginia voters. Banks is right. But the Republican Party already is the de facto party of parents. Democrats, through the machinations of their radical-woke apparatchiks, have made themselves the Anti-Parent Party. GOP lawmakers are welcome, albeit late to the fight. The RSC’s dispatch recalls Joseph Stalin’s declaration of war on Japan after America A-bombed Hiroshima. Alas, there is no mistaking the Red Army pincer movement in Manchuria with the RSC’s memo, which observed, “There is real energy from parents that we need to understand.

Sixty years ago, as a college student, I spent Thanksgiving on the island  of Quemoy off Formosa (as Taiwan was still called) eating Taiwanese turkey with Taiwanese generals, William F.  Buckley, Jr.  and chopsticks. Present-day college students — or even their parents — may not have heard of Quemoy — or its twin island, Matsu — until now. Or even Buckley, the highly articulate founder of modern conservatism, for that matter. Xi Jinping has been taking a hard and measured look at President Biden and our Department of State since last March when the Chinese Communist Party had Andrew Blinken and Jake Sullivan all but kowtowing to the CCP’s foreign affairs chief, Yang Jiechi, at a summit in Anchorage, Alaska.

Americans are beginning to seek alternatives to our established menu of colleges and universities. In fact, not just Americans. Students from other countries are also choosing alternatives to studying in the US. The combined effect has been a sharp drop in American college enrollment, which is down overall by about 8 percent over the last two years, and more than 14 percent at community colleges. International student enrollment is down a total of 15 percent, but that masks an even more serious problem: enrollment of new foreign students fell last year by 46 percent. Some of this, of course, is due to Covid. And some of it is due to a demographic shift: fewer babies born 17 to 20 years ago means fewer young people to fill the seats in lecture halls.

Like a rocket launch from the Cosmodrome, a Russian ice fishing trip must be timed just right. During my month in Archangel, a city in Russia’s far north on the edge of the Arctic Circle, the temperature swung between -30°F and a balmy 36°F. For ice fishing, the closer to the lower end of that range, the better. In fact, it’s a matter of life and death — the ice must have enough time below zero to freeze to a safe depth. I make it up to this chilly harbor town about once a year to visit my in-laws. It’s always a dramatic touchdown at the local airport as the runway, dusted with drifts of snow, appears at the last minute from out of a heavy fog.

The clipped voice on the old television newsreel tells us that November 27, 1958 was a gray old London day. The Queen, accompanied by Vice President Richard Nixon, was dedicating and opening the American Memorial Chapel at the far east end of the City of London’s great cathedral. Ordinary men and women from all over Britain paid for the chapel by public subscription. It was the least we could do. It was a miracle that the cathedral had survived the Nazi Blitz almost intact. One part of the cathedral was hit by a bomb in October 1940, and it was on that site that eighteen years later the Memorial Chapel was built. The Chapel is dedicated to the 28,000 American people who were stationed on British soil and died in World War Two, many of them on D-Day.

People are mad about fall. Kathryn Lively, a sociology professor at Dartmouth College, told the Huffington Post that autumn is America’s favorite season because it’s ingrained in us from childhood to view it as an exciting time of year. School starts up again, we get to see our long-lost chums once more, and acquiring the newest Elmo Interactive Backpack fills us with glee that lasts a lifetime. I’m not so sure about this theory, and must, for the onliest time ever, depart from my veneration of all things Fitzgerald, who wrote that “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

Most Americans want schools to promote knowledge and champion principles of human decency. They want schools to be safe. They do not want children race-shamed, or exposed to the anomic and depraved. A fourteen-year-old boy wandering around campus — any campus — wearing a floor-length dress doesn’t sound wholesome to them. What’s going on in “our” schools, some ask, and not in a sunny way. Too many know from experience, at least in metro and blue-liberal districts, that any parent who avows the Ten Commandments or praises the Boy Scout Law might get the fish-eye from the principal. If dad objects to critical race theory or transgender bathrooms, heads explode. A frosty diversity lecture might not suffice. Should we call security or 911?

If you haven’t seen the pictures of a Kentucky high school’s racy homecoming festivities yet, you might want to just close this tab and go about your day. Still here? All right, but I warned you. The pictures are SFW in the sense that you won’t get fired or anything, but you’ll definitely get some weird looks, so make sure your boss isn’t walking by. Coast clear? OK, here’s the link.

That incomparable political and social gadfly P.J. O’Rourke once claimed that he did his “principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.” For anyone interested in covering the raucous rollercoaster years of the Trump presidency, that would have meant spending a lot of time in the bar at the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a few blocks east of the White House.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe, nosediving in the polls against Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin, is making his final appeal to voters using divisive racial politics. The race for Virginia governor has focused intensely on education, as Youngkin has leaned in to the concerns of parents protesting local school boards, while McAuliffe's campaign has comparatively dismissed the issues raised as conspiracy theories or racist. McAuliffe attempted to address education policy during a speech on Sunday, but opted to do so among racial lines. The former governor accused his opponent of campaigning on a "racial dog whistle," then un-ironically went on to complain that there are too many white teachers in Virginia.

Attend a Loudoun County school board meeting in Virginia, and you will find it almost as locked down as the US Capitol post-January 6. Police cars line the streets and dozens of security personnel post up inside the building. I attended the most recent meeting on Tuesday as media and was subject to a thorough bag check and extensive metal scanning. Residents who wish to speak at meetings are not even allowed in the building until they are in the next group of ten scheduled to appear, and they are not allowed to bring in bags or purses. Chairs for the public are socially distanced, limiting the number of people who can even sit inside.

When you’re a writer, there’s no such thing as a vacation — there’s just visiting a new place with the potential to gather more material. Lucky for me, my most recent destination happened to be Hawaii. It’s a fascinating place, and if you didn’t already know it was a US state, it would be easy to mistake it for a distinct English-speaking country, albeit one with obvious and deep American influences. Oahu, the most urbanized island and home of the capital city of Honolulu, is shaped by an idiosyncratic mix of native Hawaiian, East Asian and midcentury American culture. Hawaii resembles a Pacific Island nation at least as much as it does the American mainland.

I’m not very good at golf, but that’s OK. I no longer play enough to expect to be good. I’ve long since lost my touch with my woods, and since I lack the time and inclination to reacquire it, I just tee off with a four-iron. My short game is atrocious. If I can sink a par or two and come in below 110 for 18 holes, I’m happy. As the old joke goes, golf and sex are two things you don’t have to be good at to enjoy. If golf is like sex, it’s more like a marital coupling than a hookup. To play a course skillfully requires familiarity with its every curve that can only be gained by a years-long relationship as well as a certain degree of respect (interspersed with bouts of frustration).

What’s an octogenarian to do when careless youth pay him no heed? Anthony Fauci never assented to COVID research energized by senior adolescents with hormones raging and frontal lobes still developing — yes, college kids, and no small number of them having topped up blood-alcohol levels by game time. Yet the college football season is well under way and producing “real-world data” to help determine whether it’s finally time to obsess less about virions and more about, say, Big 10 rankings. “I think it’s really unfortunate,” Dr Fauci has remarked, taking his cue from a CNBC host who noted crowded stadiums and fed him this prompt: “I thought COVID is about to have a feast. What do you think?

Remember when “Free Tibet” was a mainstay of the cool, hippie subculture that dominated the Nineties? Back when Hollywood cared about the fate of Buddhism’s Holy Land? Few will even remember that Disney — yes, the same Disney that recently filmed parts of the live-action Mulan in Xinjiang — produced a film, Kundun, about the early life of the Dalai Lama. China then retaliated by banning Disney films, causing the company to backtrack and attempt to bury the Scorsese-directed biopic. Disney's then-CEO even traveled to China to apologize. This series of events should sound familiar by now in the age of Western capitulation to China. Less commonplace these days is the sight of a celebrity sporting imagery of the Dalai Lama and any quaint talk of “freeing Tibet.

Given the recent spate of “fuck Joe Biden” chants at college football games, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a year cooped up out of the classrooms might have had a transformative effect on America’s undergraduates. Perhaps the kids finally realized that wokeness isn’t the answer? Alas, two recent case studies of campus craziness have arrived to bring Cockburn crashing down to reality. The first comes courtesy of Oberlin College, a liberal arts school infamous for its overblown “sushi-is-cultural-appropriation” scandal in 2015, paying millions in damages after its students libeled a local bakery and for inflicting Lena Dunham on the world.

Hannah Moore’s June Spectator piece on sandwiches made me hungry. Then it made me think. Ms Moore makes a sound distinction between modern Britain’s plastic-boxed, triangular ‘sandwich’ and the custom-made, piled-high, endlessly imitated, seldom-matched product of a good New York or Chicago delicatessen. Why, one wonders, do the Brits put up with it? Landing in countless foreign ports over the years, for business or pleasure, I’ve always wondered, pretty much before wondering about anything else, ‘What’s the food like?’ Almost always, I’ve liked what it was like. In the age of real borders and undiluted ethnicities, food was a powerful expression of locality.

My twin brother, who is much cooler than I am and lives in Washington, D.C., rolled into the Pennsylvania Wilds, our native land, for a visit recently. There, he offered me the chance to drive his brand-new BMW X1 — a luxury, subcompact, crossover “Sport Activity Vehicle.” The little thing was quick and responsive, so much so that forceful habits formed from driving less state-of-the-art vehicles (read: old) made my driving jerky at first. The front cabin felt wide open with barely-there window pillars. The seats were roomy and comfortable. And once I got used to the light-touch steering and ultra grippy brakes, driving the X1 was pleasant. But man, was this car annoying. For starters, I felt like a caveman trying to get the thing going.

Imagine having a bad week by Jacksonville Jaguars standards. Such is the fate that has befallen Urban Meyer, the head coach of that star-crossed NFL franchise. Meyer was recently caught on video grind-dancing at an Ohio bar with a woman who was very much not his wife. This prompted sighs of relief from us '90s kids who were worried the term 'grind-dancing' had gone out of vogue forever. It's difficult to understate just what a mess Meyer's Jaguars are. The team is one of only four NFL franchises to have never made it to a Super Bowl. They've struggled for years with mediocre quarterbacks (who among us hasn't been walking down a sidewalk only to accidentally intercept a ball from Blake Bortles?). Meyer, along with rookie hotshot QB Trevor Lawrence, were supposed to turn all that around.

I’m two miles outside Wanship, Utah, at a remarkable new hotel called The Lodge at Blue Sky. I’ve just met my host in the bar, a bear of a man called John Tuffman, or ‘Tuff’, as I’m told to call him by his assistant. Owing to my delayed flight, we’re running a little behind schedule. ‘Down the hatch’, he says, nodding to my beer while he repositions his Stetson. We climb into a car and are driven up to the barn. A few weeks ago, I received an email which I had every right to believe was a scam or an elaborate catfishing attempt. It was an invitation from an events company in San Francisco to appear as the World Perudo Champion at an executive retreat in Utah. At 6 p.m.