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Ayn Rand Likes Systems, Not Humans
Gary Cooper in “The Fountainhead” I’ve been reading Gene Bell-Villada’s excellent book On Nabokov, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Mind (Cambridge Scholars, 2013) in an attempt to better understand the...
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Why GOP Right Is Beating Up on the Poor
Paul Ryan is at it again. Last week I discussed his attack on free school lunches for the poor (“What the left is offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul”), and now he’s stigmatizing inner...
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Will Oliver Finally Get Health Care?
Barney Clark as Oliver Twist In what I recently discovered is the best selling novel of all time, Dickens famously writes, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom,...
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Race Disagreements amongst Friends
“Aphra Behn” by Mary Beale Over the past three weeks we have been witnessing a fascinating debate on “race and the culture of poverty” between two of America’s smartest liberal columnists. Although...
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Melville and Climate Change Denial
“The San Dominick” – Focal Stage of “Benito Cereno” In case you missed it, I am reposting an article I wrote this past April on Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, which I’m beginning to see as a...
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Why Christie Aides Targeted Sokolich
The Execution of Admiral Byng We still don’t have a definitive answer as to why, last September, aides of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie closed down two of the three access lanes to the world’s busiest...
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GOP Denies a Giant Problem
To help save the planet, the president has done something big, using his executive authority to cut carbon emissions from existing coal burning plants. As Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine puts it,...
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Principle or Expedience?
Mr. and Mrs. Crawley in “Last Chronicle of Barset” I’ve been traveling through the Midwest with my mother to see relatives. First we traveled to Des Moines and I met for the first time a set of cousins...
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American Politics, Dashiell Hammett Style
I’ve been taking advantage of my vacation to read through the collected novels of the best known novelist from my home county, whose complete works I discovered on my mother-in-law’s bookshelf. Not...
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Using Kipling to Voice Despair
Durer, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” I see that Roger Cohen of the New York Times used a Rudyard Kipling poem to frame a despairing column today. The poem is “The Gods of the Copybook...
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Hunkering Down in Hard Times
Audubon, “Great Blue Heron” I write this before knowing the election results but am prepared for a fairly widespread Democratic defeat. The fact that the opposition party always takes control of...
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Dickens Understood Resentment Well
Illus. from “Little Dorrit” I sometimes think that if I really understood how resentment works, I would understand American politics. It seems to drive a lot of what we do, especially when times are...
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Is It Time to Bring Out Twain’s War Prayer?
Boehner and Netanyahu I’ve been discouraged in recent weeks by how easily war fever returns, even after our disastrous experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only does polling reveal increased...
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When American Fantasies Are Dangerous
Teaching an American Fantasy Literature class is helping me better understand denialism, which has come to define a major element of the Republican party. When the world takes a disturbing turn, one...
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Ted Cruz’s Starring Role in “The Crucible”
Miller’s play was a response to Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts A high school English teacher, Pat Osowski of Ripon High School (Wisconsin), wrote me last week asking whether I had ever written about The...
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Political Consultants Should Read Lit
Henry Fuseli, “Macbeth and the Witches” Mention Hamlet in the title of your column and you’ve got my immediate attention. Frank Bruni of the New York Times did so yesterday in an article about a...
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Satan: Freedom Fighter Turned Dictator
Gustave Dore, Satan addresses the Council of Hell One of my students, while serving an internship in Maryland’s state capitol, discovered in my British Literature survey that Milton has something...
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Trollope, Obama, Schmoozing, & the Media
The last two summers I’ve been driving my mother around the country to visit old relatives. Last summer we visited her Jackson and Montgomery cousins in Des Moines, Iowa, and this summer it was the...
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Trump, Clifton, and Women’s Biology
Donald Trump, Megyn Kelly An expert carnival barker knows that, to be successful, always keep your audience off balance. By these standards, Donald Trump is putting on the performance of his life. Who...
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Passion vs. No Conviction–Anything Else?
Norman Rockwell, “Breakfast Table Political Argument” (1948) The respected Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne yesterday nominated William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” as “the most cited poem...
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