Paywall

Wednesday

Matt Purple

The demise of America has been greatly exaggerated

One of my favorite quotes about America — mainly because it annoys so many people — comes from the historian Robert Wiebe. In his book Self-Rule, he writes: ‘Telling Americans to improve democracy by sinking comfortably into community, by losing themselves in a collective life, is calling into the wind. There has never been an American democracy without its powerful strand of individualism, and nothing suggests there will ever be.’ Cue the yelping from nationalists, socialists, Burkeans, take your pick. Yet Wiebe was less making a political argument than he was observing what was right in front of his nose.

america

Monday

Augustine Bland

The Disneyfication of the moral universe

‘I’m sitting here struggling for words and my friend nailed it: “She was our Princess Leia.”’ With those words, Dr Esther Choo, Yale Medical School graduate, holder of an Ivy League English diploma and possessor of 168,000 Twitter followers, memorialized the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A century ago, a citizen of Justice Ginsburg’s stature might have inspired references to the Bible, classical history or the great figures of America’s founding. But in the year 2020, a lifetime of achievement brings no greater honor than to be compared with a Disney-owned property whose action figure you can buy for $10.99.

disneyfication
disunited america
Spectator Editorial

Onwards and upwards

It would strain credibility to assert that this election campaign has enhanced America’s reputation in the world. The best that might be said is that it has been a slightly less gruesome spectacle than the 2016 affair — and that, perhaps, only because the pandemic has limited public appearances. The great puzzle is how a country of 330 million cannot seem to find two more inspiring candidates. Yet should we take seriously those who are forecasting that the country now descends into civil war or that democracy has died? No, and not just because the latter prediction tends to be conditional on the election’s failing to deliver their favored outcome. American democracy, American power and influence are not dying, and neither are they under threat.

Sunday

Revd Steve Morris

The sorry history of London’s Hoover Building

In the early Thirties, when impoverished Americans were cramming into shanty towns called ‘Hoovervilles’, another Hoover created an industrial building of rare magnificence in west London. Driving into London from Heathrow airport, we see acres of nondescript suburbs. The Hoover Building at Perivale, about five miles from the West End, still astounds. Set back from the road in well-manicured gardens, this art deco masterpiece rises in brilliant white (due to the use of a cement called Snowcrete), its façade laced with angular green trim and sunburst decoration. The Hoover Building was the British factory of the Hoover Company, the Ohio-based vacuum-cleaner manufacturer.

hoover
schools
Bill Kauffman

Bring back small high schools

Batavia, New York I’m scribbling this on the porch as I stare at the chain-sawed remains of our massive and ancient (by American standards, which are the only standards I know) front-yard maple tree, which split in a windstorm and crushed my car. I had hoped to be a good custodian and pass along these sylvan sentinels intact to those who come after, but like America...well, I won’t go for a cheap and inexact analogy. Oh, 2020, you most annus horribilis. But I am an inveterate looker-on-the-bright-side, and among the reasons for hope in this darksome time is the potential for new, or renewed, growth on the branches of the learning tree. (If I may borrow a line from the Jackson 5.

Thursday

Paul Wood

But seriously: will Trump refuse to leave?

At a drinks party in Washington DC just after Donald Trump was elected, someone from the old regime told me: ‘This will end with tanks on the White House lawn.’ It was a popular opinion that night, although there was confusion over whether the tank barrels would point inwards or outwards. Would Trump do something so outrageous that he would have to be removed by the US military? Or would he declare himself president-for-life with help from the generals? At the time, I put this down to shock at Trump’s unexpected victory, an early example of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But now, in the final stages of the 2020 campaign, you hear speculation like this from both sides of the political divide. Dictatorship, state of emergency, civil war?

leave
Constance Watson

Killing time in Thailand

Thailand is famous for many things, some of which are unmentionable in these pages. It has long been considered the perfect location for ‘winter sun’, if you are the type of person to whom a piña colada on a white sandy beach appeals. In recent years, it has become a hotspot for hypochondriacs requiring non-essential medical care and hysterics after a nip-and-tuck (pre-COVID, the health-tourism industry was thought to be growing at 14 percent a year). Home to the orchid, pad thai, the Monkey Buffet festival (what it says on the tin), the Siamese cat and the bumblebee bat, Thailand’s gentle and healing culture has earned it a reputation as a cleaner, greener land.

thailand
Luke Haines

Back to my Toots

Pop music is tribalist by nature and divisive by desire. It was always the Beatles or the Stones, mods or rockers, burn the Beatles’ records or ‘hang the DJ’ and, most important of all, Bob Marley or Big Youth? (The answer is Big Youth.) Only one man transcended this nonsense: Frederick Nathaniel ‘Toots’ Hibbert. Anyone who has heard Toots but doesn’t dig his mighty soul skank should be cast into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights of good, hard thinking. Toots died on September 11 in his native Jamaica. He was 77, allegedly the victim of complications from COVID-19. The man may have gone, but his vibrations will live on as long as mankind has ears to listen and feet to dance.

toots
Amber Duke

Atlas shrugs

‘Trust the experts’ is the battle cry of America’s elitists. After President Trump’s shock election in 2016 showed that Americans are sick of hearing from politicians, the politicized classes adopted experts as their proxy for power. Climate change ‘experts’ justify AOC’s radical Green New Deal with prophecies of planetary extinction. Foreign policy ‘experts’ claim America will destabilize the Middle East if, as Trump wants, we withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan. Medical ‘experts’ are wheeled out to justify increasing control over the lives of everyday Americans through draconian lockdowns, mask mandates and stringent travel restrictions.

scott atlas

Wednesday

Dominic Green

Booker prized

Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed pianist New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died in 1983, aged 43, ruined by drugs, drink and madness, and attended by legends of delinquency lurid even for a New Orleans piano ‘professor’. Though he had appeared on plenty of other people’s records and stages, Booker had recorded only three studio albums in his lifetime. Classified, recorded in October 1982 and now re-released on vinyl, was the last of them. It might not be the best of them, but it shows why Booker was one of the greats. The studio was booked for three days, but Booker had a breakdown the week before and couldn’t get a good take down in the first two days.

booker

Monday

James Delingpole

Sensei it again

Almost the best thing about Cobra Kai is the response, somewhere between bemused and appalled, it has generated among woke millennials and Gen Z-ers. One reviewer noted with concern that neither of the two featured karate schools is run by someone of Japanese ethnicity. Another squirmed at two middle-aged men’s almost Trump-level inappropriateness, when while discussing the qualities of a mutual old flame they referred to their inamorata’s ‘tightness’. Yes. It’s one of the reasons we Eighties dinosaurs love it so. Cobra Kai is our safe space. It’s our Helm’s Deep of unreconstructed sexism in an otherwise Orcish horde-overrun Middle Earth of gender fluidity, #MeToo and micro-aggressions.

cobra kai
russiagate
Roger Kimball

Will we ever know the truth about Russiagate?

Writing in mid-October, anno domini 2020, it is sobering to speculate that when the results of a certain upcoming political contest are finally decided, an item that has captivated the public’s attention for nearly four years might be about to evaporate without trace. I refer, of course, to that great long-running entertainment, the Trump-Russia Collusion Delusion. As I write, the latest morceaux are the revelations from John Ratcliffe, the newly installed Director of National Intelligence, to the effect that Russian intelligence believed that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services’ during the 2016 presidential campaign. Why? Typical campaign dirty tricks, in part.

Sunday

Toby Young

The paranoid style in left-wing politics

Did Donald Trump fake his battle with coronavirus to boost his standing in the polls? No, obviously not. He spent three nights in the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center; White House physician Dr Sean Conley confirmed he had the disease at a press conference flanked by a team of 10 doctors — and at least eight other people who attended the Rose Garden event where the President is thought to have been infected also tested positive. Yet many of Trump’s opponents are convinced the whole COVID drama was a hoax.

paranoid

Friday

Harry Mount

Their Majesties the Presidents

For anyone who’s a little bit worried about the current state of the Union, Andrew Gimson’s book is a godsend. Donald Trump is often called the 45th president, but he’s actually the 44th — Grover Cleveland, president from 1885- 89 and 1893-97, is counted as the 22nd and the 24th. Among his 43 predecessors, you’ll find plenty of drunks, philanderers and incompetents. Suddenly, the teetotal President doesn’t look so bad after all. Gimson is a British journalist, but don’t let that put American readers off. He’s worked for the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator and knows politics well. He previously wrote books about the 40 British monarchs since 1066, the 55 British prime ministers since 1721 and a biography of Boris Johnson.

presidents

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Monumental Mahler

A kind of gigantism took hold of the European mind in the years before World War One. It shaped everything, from empires to poetry. In the confidence of new technology and new ideas, things could be attempted on a larger scale than ever before. The mental power of the age could be measured in the sheer size of the things it produced. This might be ‘Jacky’ Fisher’s Dreadnought of 1906, which set off a European arms race in huge battleships, or a great construction — the Victoria memorial in front of Buckingham Palace is nothing to the one built in Kolkata.

mahler
soup
Jane Stannus

In the soup

Ah, autumn, season of mists and mellow soupfulness, as the poet Keats didn’t quite say. In southern England, where Keats was inspired to write his famous ode to summer’s red-and-golden aftermath, fall mists may stick around all day; but in New England, they burn off with the morning sun, giving way late in the day to heady breezes that blow clean through the soul. It was Geoffrey Chaucer who brought the word autumn into the English language. As sure as ‘Aprill with his shoures soote’ leads ‘folk to goon on pilgrimages’, so October cries out for vigorous outdoor activity followed by autumnal soup.

dolly parton
Emily Ferguson

Morals and mortality

There is a moment in the first episode of Dolly Parton’s America when you think the sainted songstress may have made the worst mistake of her career. ‘Do you think of yourself as a feminist?’ asks host Jad Abumrad. ‘No, I do not,’ Dolly says. There is a pause as wide as the gap between those who have four-year degrees and those who don’t. After Dolly says she thinks feminism means hating men, Abumrad cuts to an interview with feminist, Heartland author and Dolly superfan Sarah Smarsh. They grasp for a reason why Dolly would think so non- progressively. The interview starts to feel like a wake.

Tuesday

Mary Kate Skehan

Bring back robber barons

Like almost every American schoolchild, I was taught to despise the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Rockefeller, Astor, Vanderbilt: they lived in opulence while their businesses abused workers, compromised their health, ignored their rights and sucked our nation’s abundant natural resources dry. They bought off politicians with promises of special favors and lobbied hard for low taxes and minimal regulation. Can you believe major corporations once behaved this way? Now that we’ve learned from the mistakes of the Gilded Age, we have more enlightened companies, like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. Right? I’m not so sure. The coronavirus crisis has revealed the terrifying grip our modern barons hold over less fortunate Americans.

robber barons
ports
Roger Kimball

Ports for any storm

Just as tastes in female beauty have differed widely through the ages — take a comparative glance at the damsels Rubens featured with those of Botticelli (I leave the Venus of Willendorf out of account) — so, too, does the taste in wine vary through the ages. The British critic George Saintsbury was a giant in the field of literary scholarship. He was also an avid apologist for wine, and his Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920) is a classic in the literature of wine writing. A modern reader, however, cannot help but be struck by the prominent place given to wines that have fallen out of favor today, especially such fortified wines as sherry, Madeira and port.

Monday

Christopher Snowdon

Don’t listen to the health fascists — drink up

It was always likely that once the killjoys had done their work on smoking they would turn their attention to alcohol. Sure enough, with the Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee going through its twice-a-decade revision of what, and how much, Americans ought to be eating and drinking in order to look after their health, drinking alcohol is being subjected to the same demonization process that was once applied to smoking tobacco. There is a campaign to lower safe drinking limits in the US, in the same way that they have been lowered in other countries. Worse, there is pressure to eliminate altogether the concept of a ‘safe level’ of alcohol consumption — and make out that every drop brings a drinker a little closer to his or her demise.

drink alcohol