The drone zone | The Spectator

Should elders be respected?

For the left, the world has always been, and always will be, a scandal. In this American election year, it has not escaped their anger and disgust that of the two presumed candidates for a second residential lease on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the incumbent is eighty-one years of age, while his challenger is seventy-eight. Yet that societies should be governed by their elders was taken for granted through all of human history down to very recent times. This was owing not to their experience alone, but to the fact that premodern people lived substantially in the past, recognizing that it — as Faulkner said — “is never dead, it’s not even past.

Bill Kauffman

Gazing at the eclipse in Walt Whitman’s perfect silence

The day before the April 8 eclipse — our postage stamp of ground sat smack dab in the middle of totality — we abounded in sunshine and birdsong, with nary a cloud in the sky. The day after, too, was dominated by the yellow star moseying along the ecliptic, but on the big day — we won’t be similarly situated for another 120 years — ole Sol was obscured by thick gray clouds. (Which parted, as if on mischievous cue, two hours after the celestial spectacular.) This is why Western New Yorkers exhibit a cheerful “oh well” fatalism, and why we know that the Buffalo Bills kicker will always miss the game-ending field goal. The hungry and hotel-hunting eclipse trackers who were predicted to overrun our rural county, leaving a spoor of tourist dollars, never showed.

Bill McMorris

The ins and outs of fatherhood

Alexandria, Virginia It is impossible to read through the transparent eyelids of an eight-day-old just what kind of young lady she will become, but I already know Katherine Matilda is going to have impeccable comedic timing. She announced her existence a week after we donated all the maternity and infant clothes, diapers and, natch, car seats — a month after we signed off on a renovation that demolished the entire ground floor for the duration of a pregnancy. She came home on a Saturday, a week into a pinkeye epidemic in which half of her sisters proved allergic to antibiotic eyedrops. There was a time when such chaos would have sent sleep-deprived parents into crisis. That time was Monday.

Life