Half the country is enraged. The other half is incredulous.
The party of rage shouts, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” The party of incredulity cries, “I’m shocked as hell, and I’m not going to listen to this anymore!”
At the same time, each side follows the other’s grievances Read More
“When you meet a contradiction, make a distinction.” I’ve always loved that thought from Thomas Aquinas. Applied to contemporary politics, it means that rather than seeing the Tea Party as the wicked Other, we might consider the ways in which the Tea Party reflects the general atmosphere.
Consider the affinity between Tea Party laughter and Read More
The Last CriticThe Social Network
The Social Network is many things, but mainly it is a dazzling polemic.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher have performed an ingenious feat. They have used the old-fashioned medium of film, now under siege by the digital culture, to expose Facebook’s manipulative culture of seeming self-exposure. When Mr. Sorkin told New York magazine Read More
“Nature invented hunger. We invented bullshit.” I was awakened by those words last Tuesday, as I slept on the floor in my underwear on a foam mattress below the hospital bed of my wife, who had just given birth to a baby girl. It was our ob-gyn who had spoken them, a brilliant Manhattan doctor Read More
Like an allergy, the anathema of “elite” crops up, disappears and recurs depending on the quality of the political air. But the original meaning of the term has been lost.
“Elitism” as modern political curse originated with Senator Joseph McCarthy, who used it to refer to American Communists and fellow travelers. Since to become a Read More
No one cares to make the connection, but it’s a glaring fact: Our most recent two presidents have whopping daddy problems. All men have some kind of daddy problem, but not all men have a whopping daddy problem. The Oedipal difference between George Bush Jr. and Barack Obama Jr. is that the former’s father was Read More
It is tragically ironic to say so, but the days and weeks following 9/11 were probably the last time the country experienced anything like social harmony. If a major terrorist attack struck America today, the social and political landscape would be utterly transformed.
A substantial segment of the population believes that the man who sits Read More
On the occasion of the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, allow me to speak bluntly about the chief reason why our involvement there has been such a wretched failure.
It’s simple: We don’t have the guts and the brains to build and sustain an empire. The proof of our inadequacy is that our best Read More
Ground Zero MosqueThe Last Critic
America may be, as Gertrude Stein once wrote, the oldest young country in the world, but we are currently afflicted with the growing pains of a national neophyte. We are now experiencing several furious battles—waged in different keys—over the ownership of symbols.
In lower Manhattan, the city’s decision to allow an Islamic center to be Read More
A few years ago, I found myself on the giant playground known as the Google “campus” in Mountain View, Calif., speaking to a small group of Google employees about, among other things, originality. I tried to make what I thought was a pretty unoriginal point.
The culture, I suggested, rewarded successful copying Read More
