The answer to the question I pose in the headline above is: when the responsible politician is asked about it. Very occasionally, events are so catastrophic that they oblige a brief period of no-spin truth-telling — the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were an example — but such examples are rare, which is a mercy in one obvious respect.
Mostly, however, calamities inflicted on nations, commonly by hapless leaders who think too highly of their own abilities, are brushed aside as trivial right up to the moment when voters have had enough, and it is the politician who is brushed aside instead.
In my column this week, I refer to the “winter of discontent,” when Britain was cracking under mass strikes by unionized labor and an inflation rate that was vaporizing savings. In January of 1979, Prime Minister James Callaghan returned, tanned and rested, from a Caribbean conference and dismissed the nation’s problems in a manner summed up famously by one newspaper headline as “Crisis? What Crisis?”
President Biden and everyone in his administration respond in much the same way when asked about the flood of illegal immigrants pressing their noses up against the southern border, demanding to live in the United States and confident that the new incumbent of the Oval Office won’t turn them away. It’s not a crisis now, you understand, even though the numbers are greater than ever — far higher than those for which President Donald Trump was excoriated as a heartless bastard throughout his term in office.
There’s another crisis, at least for one politician, at the other end of the country, in New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is fighting for his political life in the face of allegations from seven women that he sexually harassed them. Now that he’s no longer useful as a pit bull to unleash against Trump for his response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Democratic politicians are signaling their virtue by calling on the governor to resign.
But, as Karol Markowicz argues in our cover story, “Always a Bully,” Cuomo’s arrogance, vulgarity, and insouciance toward the norms of decency have long been apparent. He was always as ineffably pleased with himself as his party colleagues pretended to be with him during the past year. His current self-inflicted calamity was a constant likelihood, as was his brutish response, the digging in of his heels.
Peter Tonguette takes up a different case of alleged abuse, that involving filmmaker Woody Allen, and its ramifications for our culture in a newly woke world. Tonguette argues it’s vital that we continue to value artistic quality, whatever the unpleasant characteristics of the artist; Tiana Lowe winces at the grotesque spectacle of the Grammy Awards show; James McElroy reviews and recommends Beyond Order, Jordan Peterson’s latest defense of traditional values against the deterioration of our hideous post-modern culture; Graham Hillard watches the new TV series Behind Her Eyes to its outlandish finish; and Eric Felten counsels that one should get drunk like a monk.
