Spectator Life

You realize western tourists are a rarity when the locals ask to take selfies with you. I was standing under the mammoth ramparts of the Ark, Bukhara’s great palace fortress, when two women came up and asked if they could have their picture taken with me. One was dressed Uzbek-style in a colorful dress with matching trousers and knotted headscarf, the other in a western blouse and trousers. We lined up, beaming, in front of a haughty two-humped camel. Visiting Uzbekistan is a huge adventure. It’s the heart of Central Asia and the old Silk Road, a land of deserts and oases where you can still feel as if you’re stepping back in time. But it’s also unexpectedly safe, easy, inexpensive and welcoming. At the airport, even the immigration officials were smiling.

On the morning of November 1755, Lisbon was struck by one of the deadliest earthquakes in history. It measured between 8.5 and 9.0 on the Richter scale, split the city center with fissures 16 feet wide, and killed perhaps 40,000 people (out of a population of 200,000). Shocked survivors gathered by the docks on the River Tagus, which had turned to a giant mudflat, littered with wreckage, as the sea mysteriously retreated. Many of them were killed by the tsunami that engulfed the city center 40 minutes later. Still, every cloud has a silver lining.

On November 18, 2015, a group of Princeton University undergraduates calling themselves the Black Justice League, or BJL, invaded historic Nassau Hall and occupied President Christopher Eisgruber’s office overnight, refusing to leave until Eisgruber had agreed to, and signed off on, their list of ‘demands’. Most famously, they demanded the purging of Woodrow Wilson’s name from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and from one of the residential colleges, Wilson College. At the time, Eisgruber promised to form committees to discuss the students’ demands; skillfully sidestepping the controversy. Today, however, nearly five years later, Eisgruber has announced that Wilson’s name is coming down.

In late March I left New York, fleeing the mayor more than the virus. Sunlight being the best disinfectant and I having parents to see, I grabbed a tube of disinfecting wipes and flew to Palm Beach, Florida. After seven weeks of sunny inanition, I prepared to leave and return home. Among my objectives was the fulfillment of a request by a New York friend to pick up a carton of cigarettes for him at Florida prices. Though not a smoker, I sympathize with the tax-burdened as a rule. Entering the Palm Beach Publix supermarket, surely the only Publix with valet parking, I made straight for the tobacco counter, having been advised by my nicotine-addict friend that the store was known to carry his off-piste brand, Carlton 100s.

Students at Loyola University New Orleans are seeking to oust Walter Block, a libertarian business school professor, through a Change.org petition. In response, a rival petition is asking Loyola’s administration to offer Block a raise.A student called M.C. Calzalas began the petition calling for Block’s termination. According to the petition, Block ‘has publicly stated that he believes slavery to be wrong because it goes against Libertarianism, not because it is morally wrong. He has justified women being paid less than men’.Worst of all, ‘He is allegedly an ableist, too.

The New York Times’s opinion editor resigned in disgrace earlier this month following a newsroom revolt over the publication of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton. The op-ed 'put black New York Times staffers in danger', the newspaper's reporters lamented in nearly identical tweets, because it called for using the National Guard to put down the riots in nearly every major American city. The incident perfectly framed what happens when weak-minded college students who are seldom exposed to opposing or controversial viewpoints graduate into the nation's top newsrooms. The campuses themselves aren't faring much better. Members of Generation Z are thought to be more culturally conservative than their millennial counterparts, but Georgetown students must have missed the memo.

An anonymous Instagram account surfaced this weekend that accused multiple Ivy League students of racism, without evidence.‘Ivy League Racists’ (@ivyleagueracists) — which has since been deleted — posted pictures of white male students alongside descriptions of the racist acts they purportedly committed.For instance, one post read: ‘[name redacted] of [location redacted] raped an innocent black freshman at Penn. The victim is now suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts. Contact Penn Police at 2155733333.’Another post was aimed at a former Princeton sportsman, naming his hometown, parents and siblings. Neither post provided any tangible proof of the students’ alleged misconduct. The Spectator reached out to both men for comment.

I am not American and I am not descended from British slave owners, but I was shocked when I read a letter from the 1860s that my Irish great-grandfather wrote to his brother from Peru, acknowledging receipt of a ‘shipment of Chinese coolies’ in the guano trade. John Cummings III of Louisiana is also of Irish origin, and his ancestors never owned slaves either. But in 2014, Cummings, a retired lawyer, and his wife Donna used $8.6 million of their own money to create the Whitney Plantation Museum at Wallace, just under an hour from the French Quarter of New Orleans. The Whitney museum is America’s first and so far only museum of slavery. My cousin and I drove there from New Orleans on a bitter winter’s day. There is no café.

From the beginning of the lockdown in March, it became clear that children were going to have a very different experience depending on where they are educated. Many private schools and some of the best public schools immediately made arrangements for teaching to continue online, uninterrupted. For many other children, it has been a case of only being set the odd homework assignment.The quality in educational experience during the lockdown is going to have a very large impact on attainment. A rapid evidence assessment by the Education Endowment Foundation, a British think tank, has attempted to put a figure of just how the attainment gap could grow if children are kept out of the classroom until September.

‘These regions are not under the control of the central government,’ reads a warning on a map in the bustling center of Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. ‘Traveling to these regions is not advisable.’ One of these regions is Abkhazia, only a few hours’ drive away. The other is South Ossetia, barely an hour from here. Since 2008 both have been occupied by Russian troops, in defiance of the Georgian government. Yet here in Tbilisi, tourism is booming, and many of the tourists are Russians. This neat irony encapsulates what makes Tbilisi such a fascinating city, a looking-glass metropolis in which nothing is quite what it seems.

The West is dying and we are killing her. We’re proud to destroy our own freedoms and repackage failure as democratic progress. We champion our rolling-out of red tape, the bureaucratic creep that strangles a nation’s liberty. The American Dream has been replaced by mass-packaged mediocrity porn, encouraging us to revel like happy pigs in our own meekness.No place demonstrates this demise better than the San Francisco Bay Area. Despite the area’s claims to diversity, it suffocates with homogeneity. Everyone wants to start a company, everyone wants to be a contrarian investor, everyone thinks about everything in exactly the same way. Expensively indifferent, my Palo Alto house had the same architect and unique style as every other house on the street.

On a cold and unremarkable November night about 10 years ago, I arrived from India in Knoxville, Tennessee. The first thing I noticed about my new home was its massive front porch.Long and unfussy, it stretched along the entire width of the red-brick Craftsman bungalow. It had an old wooden floor and on one side furniture half-swallowed by shadow. More than anything, I was struck by its deep sense of ease, and how familiar it felt. I’d grown up in a small town in India, in a bungalow with a veranda not unlike this porch. Standing on it that freezing night, I suddenly felt a little less cold.

Welcome, freshpersons and already indebted students, to the fall semester at COVID College. The college experience is an essential part of American life. For it is here that our young adults learn the American values of democratic socialism, gender exploration, racial guilt and defaulting on the first of, we hope, many unpayable debts.As our adjunct instructors will fail to teach you, before the slaveholder’s charter had ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, there was white supremacist philosopher John Locke’s ‘Life, liberty and property’. Owning a property is so American that even the homeless of Los Angeles aspire to have their own tents. So it’s right that your college education is your first mortgage.

The first time I saw Texas, I was more than ready for it. I crossed the state line in the middle of a month-long, coast-to-coast road trip after a hellish tour in Afghanistan. ‘You can go to Hell, but I am going to Texas,’ said Davy Crockett. I think he had a point. Texas is better, though it’s nearly as hot come summertime. My wingman and I did our best to honor Hunter S. Thompson’s advice to embrace ‘madness in any direction, at any hour’. Well, of a sort. We were both still subject to the army’s random drug tests, plus it was hard to entirely forget the chivalrous officer code drilled into us at Sandhurst, the West Point of Britain.