Dominic Green

American conservatives don’t usually like Marxist guerrillas, but they make an exception for the Kurds. So do American socialists. The further left you go, the more you feel the burn of contempt for the Kurds, until eventually you go far enough left to find yourself in the company of those who support the Kurds’ enemies. Our friends on the left have principles, you know. It isn’t sufficient to survive genocidal attacks and build a gender-neutral people’s militia. You have to hate America and Israel too. A bit of Islamist zealotry doesn’t go amiss either, for the decadent Western nostril is happy to mistake the stink of Islamism for the red rose of socialism.

Aretha Franklin recorded her best album, the live Gospel performance Amazing Grace, over two nights in January 1972 at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles. The Queen of Soul had crossed over, and perhaps too far, with the Live at the Fillmore West album, a play for the white rock audience that included covers of ersatz Soul and Gospel hits like ‘Love The One You’re With’ and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. Amazing Grace was Franklin’s musical and spiritual homecoming to the Baptist church. One of her mentors, the Reverend James Cleveland, presided over a full gospel choir, and the rhythm section with which Franklin had recorded the Young, Gifted and Black album in 1971. Her father, the Reverend C.L.

The vision of Jude Law filming The New Pope at the beach has been acclaimed as a miracle — the washboard abs, the white trunks sticking closer than the Swiss Guard. As followers of the heretical TV series will know, the first series of The Young Pope featured another sporting vision, nuns playing soccer in slow motion. The soccer theme, if not the sporting nuns and the sex scene, is believed to derive from the real Pope Francis’s enthusiasm for the ‘beautiful game’. Any soccer fan wishing to understand the nature of faith will understand what Francis, a juvenile goalkeeper and fan of Argentinian league side San Lorenzo, sacrificed when, in 1990, he forswore watching soccer on television.

We’ve all got a bit of Deplorable in us, even me. To paraphrase the philosopher who left the White House in 2016, I cling to my religion because it’s the tree of life. Being rather Old World as well as old school, I’m appalled by the proliferation of advanced weaponry in the US, but I favor the right to cling to some kind of gun. And having spent more time in the academy than is healthy or useful, I can confirm the ongoing accuracy of William F. Buckley’s observation about the repository of wisdom that is the first 300 names in the Cambridge, Mass. phone book. But I don’t like Steve Bannon. I’m only fascinated by him. Bannon is the West’s foremost proponent of classic left-wing revolutionary strategies.

Every circus needs a midget. This particular law of show business was established by the Victorians. It was P.T. Barnum who popularized the word ‘midget’. Harriet Beecher Stowe had used it in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to describe both children and a small adult, but it was Barnum, as great and merciless as master of the levers of sentiment as Dickens, who popularized the m-word when advertising the outsized talents of Colonel Tom Thumb, Commodore George Washington Nutt, and Lavinia Warren. Commodore Nutt, who was not a naval officer, wore a naval uniform. He loved Lavinia Warren, whose real name was Mercy Lavinia Bump. But she married the bill-topping Tom Thumb, who was originally Charles Stratton.

Nietzsche trained as a cavalryman, but injured himself attempting an unorthodox dismount. His last public act was to throw himself sobbing around the neck of a flogged horse in Turin. In the decades after the philosopher was carried to the asylum, we put horses out to pasture. Our constant companions, first domesticated on the Eurasian steppe some four- to six thousand years ago, were displaced by a new symbol of mobility and freedom, the internal combustion engine. In Farewell to the Horse (2017), the German historian Ulrich Raulff identifies the moment we abandoned our real four-legged friend as the moment we became modern — which is to say, lost amid freedom. If Americans are more lost than most, it is because they have more freedom than most.

Lewis loves Rachael. Rachael loves Lewis, but she’s not sure if he still loves her. Stephen the handsome widower loves Rachael on sight. Stephen and Rachael have an affair. What happens when Lewis finds out? This plot will be familiar to all practitioners of suburban adultery. It will also be familiar to those students who, rather than taking their pleasure quickly on the kitchen table like Stephen and Rachael, have read Anna Karenina. It is also the plot of The Aftermath, a tastefully muted mishmash of interior design, Nazi fetishism and war guilt, enlivened by that unacknowledged innovation of the World War Two era, the key party. It’s the winter of 1945. The victorious Allies have divided Germany into zones of occupation: American British, French, Russian, erogenous.

It’s always best to eat before you go to a dinner party, just to be on the safe. The same goes for weddings, but more so, because they go on so long. As a unprofessional musician who’ll play it if you’ll hum it, I’ve attended more weddings than Elizabeth Taylor multiplied by Zsa Zsa Gabor to the power of Mickey Rooney. Usually, the father of the bride spoils the fun. Weddings should be marathon festivities with endless food and rivers of free booze, but they usually tend towards reheated salmon, dysenteric chicken, emetic fake fizz, and two of the saddest words in the history of human socializing, ‘pay bar’. Jay, an Englishman of Pakistani extraction, is an enterprising fellow.