H.W. Crocker III

H. W Crocker III is a popular historian and novelist. His most recent book, available for preorder, is Armstrong and the Mexican Mystery.

Friday

H.W. Crocker III

An armed society is a polite society

Recently, early one morning at my sprawling estate in Swampland, Mississippi (a census non-designated place), I saw a bare-chested man walking across my back lawn beneath my office window. He wore a headband light, which gave him a semi-official appearance, but if he was working in some professional capacity, I reckoned, he’d be wearing a shirt. So I strolled out to the back deck and paused at the iron rail fence that surrounds it, connecting it to our guest house. Just beyond is an open outdoor shower that we use to clean off dogs and swamp muck. In it, with the water running was the bare-chested man — only now he was bare all over. I said, “Hey, buddy, what the heck are you doing?

Monday

H.W. Crocker III

Why conservatives are happier than liberals

Ross Pomeroy, editor of RealClearScience, calls it “one of the most surefire findings in all of social psychology, repeatedly replicated over almost five decades of study: American conservatives say they are much happier than American liberals. They also report greater meaning and purpose in their lives, and higher overall life satisfaction.” Given their recent embrace of lockdowns and masking as a societal ideal, drag queens as role models, abortion as a good career move, and sanctions against “misgendering,” it might not surprise you that American liberals are much more prone to neurosis, depression, and anxiety, and, as one recent study cited by Pomeroy pointed out, “have become less happy over the last several decades.

climate

Monday

H.W. Crocker III

Reading Flannery O’Connor under quarantine

I recently had a bout of Covid. The symptoms were pretty mild aside from persistent brain fog, which in my case has been a good cover for creeping senility. A much younger friend of mine confessed that she and her family celebrated their defeat of Covid with a summer beach holiday in Delaware. She and her husband still had a bit of Covid-brain — enough, apparently, that when they drove back, they came back in one car. They had driven up in two. It took them four days to figure this out. My own sense of disorientation, confusion, and fatigue has not been so dramatic. I might have fired off the odd, undiplomatic email. But I often do that. I might have wondered about where I left my reading glasses. But they are invariably suavely tilted back on my head.