Posted in History, Philosophy, tagged aeneid, chivalry, elizabeth samet, iliad, warrior ethos on March 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »
“The Flight of Aeneas” (1595), by Peter Brueghel
I can’t remember if it was the late Col. David Hackworth or the late Col. Harry G. Summers Jr. (author of the influential retrospective on the Vietnam War, On Strategy) who made the telling point that any American general in World War II worth his stars would make [...]
Posted in Philosophy, U.S. Politics, tagged 300, Frank Miller, Shadia Drury on March 30, 2008 | 4 Comments »
300: The Heroic West versus the Decadent East.
In the film 300, we see an absolute division between two contending armies. The Greeks (and especially the vanguard forces of the Spartans) embody everything good about humanity: they are handsome, cherish freedom, treat their women well, and have healthy loving heterosexual families (that last bit is especially risible for [...]
Posted in Popular culture, tagged comic books, Fredric Wertham, Ten-Cent Plague on March 29, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Dr. Fredric Wertham: not too pleased to be reading a horror comic.
Last week in the Globe and Mail, I wrote about David Hajdu’s entertaining new history of the post World War II anti-comics crusade, The Ten-Cent Plague, in which Dr. Fredric Wertham, an intellectual leader of the anti-comics crowd, is portrayed as a prissy, humourless scold. Bart Beaty, a leading comics scholar and also a [...]
Posted in Asia, tagged China, Tibet on March 28, 2008 | No Comments »
The situation in Tibet is disheartening but not without hope. Realistically, I think the best chance Tibet has is for the emergence of a Chinese Gorbachev or de Gaulle, a member of the ruling elite who recognizes the need for granting autonomy to colonized regions within the empire. What are the chances of that? Better than [...]
Posted in U.S. Politics, tagged shoddy intellectuals on March 27, 2008 | 3 Comments »
If you subscribe to to Commentary magazine, you can get a “World Terrorism wall map”. The JTA reprinted Commentary’s sales pitch with very little comment. I’ll do the same:
To say “Thank You” for your paid subscription to COMMENTARY, we will send you our full-color 39” x 26” World Terrorism wall map. Features include detailed inset maps highlighting countries [...]
Posted in U.S. Politics on March 24, 2008 | 15 Comments »
Who is responsible for the housing bubble? In the National Post Terence Corcoran manfully tries to pin the blame on the Clinton adminstration.
I’m not fan of Bill Clinton, but Corcoran could have noted that the Bush White House has followed in the same path (taking great pride in the rise of home ownership as a sign of a [...]
Posted in U.S. Politics, tagged American Revolution on March 24, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Jefferson: a loud yelper for liberty.
Studying history always makes you a bit of a fatalist: coming to terms with the complexity of the past means realizing that large scale social changes are like tsunamis; they change the world and you have can react to them but you can’t stop them. You have to deal with [...]
Posted in U.S. Politics on March 23, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The world is what it is; peace of mind requires recognizing that there is no use getting indignant at certain galling situations; all we can do is work, patiently and with good-humour, to change things.
Still, it’s worth recording that five years after the beginning of the Iraq War, major media outlets (for example, the New [...]
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Popular culture, tagged Brian Mulroney, Fredric Wertham on March 22, 2008 | 5 Comments »
A comic-book burning in Binghamton, NY, 1948.
My review of David Hajdu’s new book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America appears in today’s Globe and Mail and can be found here. I’ll have more to say about this book on this blog later this week but in the meantime, here [...]
Posted in U.S. Politics, tagged Boer War, Iraq on March 21, 2008 | 1 Comment »
British soldiers during the Boer War.
In the fifth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, many journalists are looking back with regret on their earlier support of the war (although some, like Christopher Hitchens refuse to make apologizes, which can be taken as a sign either of strong principles or of a stubborn unwillingness to [...]
