Reviews and News:
The problem with Black Lives Matter: “The movement paints a false and disturbing portrait of America in order to justify its even more disturbing aims.”
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Thomas Hardy in London: “Hardy is always associated not only with English gloom but also with the English countryside in which he was born. It was in London, however, that he became a writer, and Ford shows just how significant a role the capital played in both Hardy’s life and imagination.”
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A history of the Indian Wars and the American West: “Among the thousands—Americans (black and white) and natives alike—who fought to control the western American land mass were some who had moral scruples, were wise in military warfare, dampened their ardor for revenge, and managed to work with others in common purpose. But an overwhelming proportion of the Americans involved in trying to ‘tame the West’ seem to have been, at least in Cozzens’s telling, fools, incompetents, and men of bad faith. As for the natives, they, too, had their share of hotheads, lone wolves, men of ill judgment, and turncoats. You come away from The Earth Is Weeping shaking your head at the misunderstandings, futile efforts at conciliation, and downright brutality on all sides. It may be that all human societies are composed of more flawed characters than whole ones, but the Indian wars seem to have attracted an overabundance of men, especially on the American side, who were obtuse and ill-intentioned.”
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William Carroll: “Are traditional arguments for the existence of God at least suspect—if not false—in the light of what modern philosophy tells us about the limits of human understanding?”
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Benjamin Franklin praised the turkey as “a bird of courage” and a “true original native of America,” but he didn’t argue it should be a national symbol.
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Eisenhower and the Middle East: “At the outset of his 1995 book, The Arabists, Robert Kaplan makes the observation that what distinguished the British and American species of this odd, insular diplomatic genus was that the Brits had been imperialists, whereas the Yanks had got their start as missionaries. It is a revealing point. It is also a useful one to keep in mind while reading Michael Doran’s new history of Eisenhower’s Middle East policy, a tale that has at its center the transfer of regional authority from the British Empire to the United States.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Federalist, Case Western Reserve psychiatrist Richard B. Corradi argues that the transgender philosophy (that gender is a construct) is a delusion:
“Consider the remarkable phenomenon of transgenderism. A disorder of gender identity that afflicts a minuscule number of Americans has become a polarizing cultural cause celebre. Its influence—in capturing public attention and demanding social change—has been extraordinary, out of all proportion to the numbers of the gender-dissatisfied.
“While the political left has fully embraced the transgender agenda as a ‘civil right’ opposed by only the bigoted and hateful, many people see the movement as a concerted attack on traditional social mores and customs, an ‘in your face’ assault on conventional standards, practices, and morality.
“Clearly, the transgender phenomenon is the tip of the spear of the LGBT movement, greatly energized by the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage that includes in the definition of liberty the right of people to ‘define and express their identity.’ For the LGBT movement this literally includes the right to decide one’s gender, to claim the rights of an alternative gender (since gender is malleable, there are choices other than simply male or female), have the choice acknowledged by society as a civil right, and ultimately become accepted as a conventional lifestyle.
“However, transgenderism as a normative lifestyle may be a hard sell. While fair-minded people can agree that gays or people with gender confusion should not be discriminated against, the general public doesn’t appear to be ready to accept gender as simply a social construct or that people can be whatever gender they choose. These contentions, the conceptual foundation of transgenderism, fly in the face of reality: the biological difference between the sexes.”
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Image of the Day: Horses and snow in the Bieszczady Mountains
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Poem: Kasey Jueds, “Talisman”
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