Bill Kauffman

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

Solzhenitsyn, Russian Nobelist and noblest Russian

From our US edition

Trudging through heavy snow along the perimeter of the Maple Avenue Cemetery, my steps are punctuated irregularly by shotgun blasts from the deer hunters in the nearby woods. Why did I wear this cervine-tawny jacket? I gaze up into the slate sky of a late November twilight and think… well, my first thought is that I hope these guys are good shots, local boys and not city hunters. My second thought is of Aleksandr Solzhenitysn, the long loneliness of exile, and the sustaining dream of repatriation. ‘Away from home in a country far away Even the springtime sun is gray.’ Or so Solzhenitsyn wrote as he dreamed of his return.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Monday

Bill Kauffman

How NATO became the most sacred cow in the barn

From our US edition

Outcasts in a party disoriented by Trump Derangement Syndrome (under which “down to you is up,” as Lou Reed once sang), the peace wing of the Democratic Party has been reduced to a corporal’s guard in the House of Representatives, its eminence the admirably nonconformist surfing Hawaiian Tulsi Gabbard.Peace Democrats are even scarcer in the U.S. Senate. (Where have you gone, Frank Church? Harold Hughes? George McGovern?) Anticipating the Tweeter-in-Chief’s recent blunderbuss European tour, the Senate approved by a near-Soviet margin of 97-2 a resolution expressing what sponsor Jack Reed (D-RI) called “ironclad” support for NATO.

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

Is Andrew Cuomo about to finally get his comeuppance?

From our US edition

Almost a quarter of a century ago, New York voters, weary of Governor Mario Cuomo's sanctimonious bullyragging, rejected the three-term incumbent. Mario's son Andrew, now seeking his own third term in office, has worn out his welcome with greater celerity. But then the son has all of dad's bad qualities (i.e., he's an arrogant prick) and none of the good (Mario's wit and his ability to put a poetic gloss on standard-issue New Dealism). The latest Siena College poll finds Andrew Cuomo's favourable/unfavourable ratio balanced at a precarious 49-44 per cent. In the colony of Upstate New York, where detestation of the Cuomo name is ingested with a child's first chicken wing, he is viewed unfavourably by a margin of 60-37 per cent. Family history is instructively portentous.

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

Looking homeward

 Batavia, New York The presidential campaign just ended was mercifully lacking in the ghostwritten platitudes with which Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan lull readers of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations to sleep. Hillary Clinton’s only memorable utterance was her defamation of one quarter of the electorate as a ‘basket of deplorables’ — a curiously clumsy locution that effectively conveyed her contempt for American prole-dom and sunk her candidacy. Donald Trump’s best line was his dismissal of the foamingly bellicose Republican senator John McCain, who has built a career on his stint as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. ‘He’s not a war hero,’ said Trump. ‘I like people who weren’t captured.