Assassin's creed | The Spectator

Is everything political?

I first heard the slogan “Everything is political” from a left-wing reporter for Wyoming’s statewide newspaper in the mid-1980s, at least a decade before I became acquainted with the work of the revolutionary Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, deviser of the strategy known as the “long march through the institutions” of the West. While the right clearly has no choice but to fight fire with fire in the struggle against its ideological and political adversaries, the fact remains that the left has substantially won the battle by having helped to transform a slogan into present reality. The idea of everything as politics, and politics as everything, is ideology in its purest form.

Bill Kauffman

Remembering Jackson C. Frank

Before venturing to the North Park Theatre in Buffalo to catch a one-night-only showing of Blues Run the Game: The Strange Tale of Jackson C. Frank, the new documentary about the Queen City’s doomed native-son folksinger, I shared Frank’s most famous number, “Blues Run the Game,” with our friend Pat. “That could be the saddest song I’ve ever heard,” she said. Yet Frank wrote it during his very brief wine, women and musical heyday. One shudders to imagine what he composed as an obese, one-eyed, homeless paranoid-schizophrenic. Frank’s western New York contemporary, the novelist John Gardner, said that “art begins in a wound, an imperfection, and is an attempt either to learn to live with the wound or to heal it.

Bill McMorris

The origin of Father’s Day

On his first day in office, President Trump signed executive orders to end DEI. Schoolchildren nationwide know that he has failed to deliver, for every June they must participate in the celebration of a federal holiday that only entered the national consciousness thanks to endorsements from ACLU radicals and Big Business eager to make a buck. Ever since Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck in 2020, the children’s art instructor has forced them to write paeans to a petulant overweight drunk. I’m speaking, of course, of Father’s Day. Father’s Day began in Washington State as a church service orchestrated by Sonora Smart Dodd, an adoring daughter who wanted to honor Dad for not falling to pieces when Mom died.

Peter Watson

Palm Beach is stuck in a gridlock

Palm Beach is never happier than when it’s making news – the more unexpected the better. The latest opportunity to pat itself on the back came in the wake of Palm Beach resident Donald J. Trump’s “silly” wheeze (according to the local paper) to make Canada the 51st state. Whereas overall, as a result of President Trump’s speculations, visits to America by Canadians dropped by 2 percent in February – with a whopping 70 percent decline in bookings in March – reservations on flights from north of the 49th parallel to Palm Beach International Airport actually rose by 15 percent. The place remains popular, even for Canadians.

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