The joke's on us | The Spectator

Politicians are not ‘just like us’

Kenneth Minogue, the political philosopher from Down Under, devoted a career to the wholesale destruction of liberalism as a political, intellectual and moral system without liberals having ever noticed the fact. A decade ago, he observed that we now refer to our democratic rulers by their Christian names — Bill, Hillary, Barack, Joe, Boris and so on — as casually as we do baseball players, television anchors and rock stars. The casualness of the age is not a wholly sufficient explanation of the practice. Democratic politicians, American ones especially, have had nicknames attached to them by their constituents for at least two centuries: Little Jemmy, Old Hickory, His Accidency, Uncle Abe or the Tycoon, Old Rough-and-Ready, His Fraudulency and Amtrak Joe among numerous others.

Bill Kauffman

The downfall of Niagara Falls

If ever I pee on the grave of an American it will be that of Robert Moses, the highwayman whose roadbuilding and neighborhood-obliterating projects in New York City and New York State threw half a million people out of their homes, as Robert Caro estimated in his biographical masterpiece The Power Broker. To those who had the temerity to object to their ejection, the monster Moses hissed, “When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. I’m just going to keep right on building. You do the best you can to stop it.” So it was with teeth gnashing that I drove down Robert Moses Parkway in the city of Niagara Falls, New York, en route to the annual Armenian festival at St. Hagop Armenian Apostolic Church.

Cosmo Landesman

Getting in touch with my inner groupie

I like to think that I’m too intelligent, too sophisticated and too cultured to get excited by the presence of a famous person. Let the manipulated masses enjoy the bread and circus of celebrity; we enlightened members of the metropolitan elite are far above that sort of thing! Or so we like to think. Whenever I encounter the famous, something very strange happens to me: I go all groupie. I get excited. I giggle. I inwardly drool. I long to please. I want to be their new best friend. I want to tell all my friends about meeting my famous new friend — who isn’t actually my friend, but never mind. I was reminded of my groupie tendencies the other day when I went to the Idler Festival, Britain’s best arts and literary festival. I usually hate those sorts of events.

David Marcus

A Joycean odyssey

In retrospect I should have done it the other way round. When I mapped out the walk from my elegant Zurich hotel it looked to be about twenty minutes. What I failed to spy was the topography — and soon I was climbing a pretty serious hill through a high-end residential neighborhood. It was hot. I soldiered on, obviously appearing to the unamused Swiss on the sidewalk a weird and confused American, huffing and puffing and smoking. Then the little mountain plateaued into a blind road, a ball field and across from it the cemetery. Now it was just a matter of finding his grave. No writer, possibly no person I have never met, has occupied as much time in my mind as James Joyce. I first read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at fifteen.

Vijai Maheshwari

From Moscow to Kyiv and back again

During the best of times, I left New York for gonzo journalism in Moscow; and during the worst of times, I fled a jingoistic wartime Moscow for the post-Covid euphoria of a resurgent New York City. My life in a sense has come full circle: I left New York for Russia in my freewheeling, bohemian twenties in search of future adventure and returned in my fifties when the rose-tinted dreams of the future that fueled Russia’s hedonistic capital were snuffed out in a murderous rage. That rage of a crumbling empire also engulfed lovely Ukraine in flames, battering its gorgeous capital Kyiv, where I had spent a blissful decade. With two of the three cities that I had called home caught up in a fratricidal zero-sum war, New York is once again King of the Hill.

Life