APPEARING AT the “Capitol Fourth” concert on the Mall in Washington, D.C. yesterday, the pop singer Josh Groban sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” a paean to ennui and alienation. To the crowd gathered on the mall, and the millions who watched at home, it was perhaps enough that the melody was about their nation. This is an Americanism so automatic and unreflective, so perversely narcissistic, it does not even care when America is viewed as empty and meaningless – as long as it is the center of attention. Here are the lyrics, which describe a British couple traveling across America:

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag”
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner’s pies
And walked off to look for America Read More »

GREG JINKERSON writes:

Regarding the thread about black culture under modern liberalism, I agree wholeheartedly that the Great Society scheme, particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, amounted to a huge step in the wrong direction for blacks politically. Read More »

WITH the charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn almost certain to be dropped within the next few weeks, the question arises as to why management of the luxury hotel, Sofitel, vouched so strongly for the maid’s character.

According to some reports, the maid was engaging in illicit activities at the hotel. Even if the management did not know this or even if she was not earning money as a prostitute, it strains belief that she was the exemplary employee the hotel management insisted she was. Read More »

TEXANNE writes:

Emily Hall in this previous entry rightly admires her mother for the way she managed the household and children during many long absences of the father. Her description of her mother as being “both father and mother,” immediately struck a chord because, in a way, it seems to give short shrift to the reality of her father’s genuine significance and active role as head of the family. Even if he happened to be away fulfilling his obligations to his family,  they knew their father was real, knew who he was and why he was away and that he would come back.  Read More »

I HAVE been away from my computer for two days, celebrating my son’s graduation from high school. At VFR, there are many entries on the latest developments in the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, which appears to involve stunning prosecutorial ineptitude and prejudice. The credibility of the victim, a black African maid, appears to have been only superficially investigated before Strauss-Kahn was indicted, suggesting an overeagerness to  believe her and to accuse a famous man. The latest entry can be found here.

At Galliwatch, a blog devoted to current events in France, Tiberge writes of the new revelations: Read More »

INGRID writes:

Thanks for publishing Josaphine’s story the other day. I have often thought about writing my own story, of how liberalism almost ruined my life, as a way to warn others. I was lucky – I had a few “eye-opening” events when I was still young enough to change course without any long-term damage or problems, although like anyone else, I suffer the consequences of some of my past mistakes. I had already radically changed the course of my life when I discovered your blog, but I have been reading it since you started writing and it has been one of several important influences on me. Read More »

THIS RECIPE is from Roy Finamore’s excellent book One Potato, Two Potato. The cake is unconventional because the batter includes potato, which makes it moist and earthy. It is best if made a day ahead of time. For Fourth of July, you can make this a flag cake in a 9×13 sheet pan and top it with vanilla or boiled icing. Make red stripes with food coloring applied to a small amount of icing and use blueberries for stars. My mother always made a flag cake on July Fourth. 

When my husband was a child he misheard the name of the holiday. He thought July Fourth was “July Force.” That makes sense in a way. The day has all the force of July.

Farmhouse Chocolate Cake
Makes one 10-inch tube cake

3/4 pound all-purpose potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
Coarse salt
Cocoa powder for dusting
5 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
2 tablespoons honey Read More »

THE Rev. James Jackson writes:

With the beautiful paintings you’ve been posting lately, I thought you might enjoy this poem.
 
TO AN OAK TREE

           — E.C. Wells

Three hundred changing summers, winters too,
Since first the quivering sapling struggled through,
A hundred thousand days since you were born,
And took to earth from out the green acorn.
Survived the pounding hoof and rooting pig,
Put out first fragile arms, and then the big. Read More »

AN ANONYMOUS reader wrote this to Washington Post columnist Carolyn Hax:

I hope this doesn’t sound too pathetic. My wife asked me what I wanted for Father’s Day this year; I said, “sex.” I figured it would be free and not too much trouble. Read More »

EMILY HALL writes:

A very good friend of mine recently introduced me to your blog. Since then I haven’t gone a single day without perusing your archives. I am writing for two reasons. The first is to provide you with a link to my blog in which I have mentioned you. The second reason requires a much lengthier discussion.

I’d like to thank you for helping me solve an issue I was wrestling with. Read More »

JOHN E. writes:

There is in the statement of Christine Lagarde’s that you quoted, a refusal to accept the world as it is, and a shaking of the fist at God’s creation, albeit in a “personally charming and likable” way. Read More »

CHRISTINE LAGARDE, the French finance minister just appointed to replace Dominique Strauss-Kahn as head of the International Monetary Fund, told journalist Christiane Amanpour last October, in a remark typical of the Feminine Superiority Complex, that women are more suited to major financial deal-making because they “inject less libido and less testosterone into the equation. … It helps in the sense that we don’t necessarily project our egos into cutting a deal.”

But, wait, isn’t the claim that she has no ego egotistical? NPR reports further on Lagarde, who is the first chief executive goddess in the post and who thus will bring a startlingly new perspective to global finance, a perspective that has nothing to do with self-interest:

Edwin Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has met Lagarde on several occasions. He says her style is both politically forceful but personally charming and likable.

“She is an aggressive spokesperson for the advancement of women in everything,” he says. “And indeed the truth of the matter is [that] in the economic and financial area, women are for a variety of reasons underrepresented.”

How does one promote the advancement of women in everything? Better yet, how does one do it without showing rank favoritism? And when would the advancement of women in everything achieve its goal?

Something tells me this everything does not include the realm of housewifery. I may be wrong; it’s just a hunch. Let me propose an end point for this project. The campaign for Worldwide Female Advancement must not end until every woman is head of the International Monetary Fund. That’s a fair and modest goal.

Read More »

Roundhay Lake, John Atkinson Grimshaw

Read More »

WRITING AT VFR, Sage McLaughlin responds to a commenter who says that blacks were better off under slavery than they are in communities that are violent and chaotic. McLaughlin writes:

American blacks after Reconstruction and before the civil rights era made fantastic progress in terms of education, productivity, and overall well-being. Read More »

WRITING for the Supreme Court majority that struck down a California law banning the sale of violent video games to children yesterday, Justice Antonin Scalia equated electronic games that enable a player to kill, maim, dismember or sexually assault an image of a human being with Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Exhibiting what appears to be a stunning obliviousness to the power of the image over the written word, as well as an unfamiliarity with both video games and fairy tales, Scalia included “Cinderella,” “Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel” among the stories he likened to electronic games that depict human beings blown up, raped or torn apart.

The First Amendment rights of the video game industry, which takes in more than $10 billion annually, have been affirmed. Common sense, backed by studies that show that violent video games increase aggression, has been discarded once again in favor of abstract individual rights. Freedom of expression is held more sacred than the right of the community to protect the young. Read More »

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes about a Philadelphia journalist’s reaction to the flash mob that injured her friends. Unable to address the glaring racial aspect of the attack, the woman is left with platitudes. Auster makes the wry observation:

She wants to crochet [a gift for her hospitalized friend] because as a liberal writer living in liberal society she has nothing to say as a writer, because any true and real statements she might make about the things happening in her world are forbidden.

This is what liberals are reduced to when their liberal world starts to crumble: the F word and crocheting. Read More »

HERE’S a worthwhile piece by W. James Antle, III in The American Spectator about same-sex “marriage” in New York. I strongly disagree with his statement that “the momentum is decidedly in favor of New York-style matrimony,” but he makes the important point, stated many times before but never enough, that modern divorce paved the way for homosexual “marriage” and that there are grave implications for all families as the bond between children and their biological parents is trivialized by same-sex unions. When law does not enshrine the role of the biological parent, there is ample room for family courts to step in and define what a parent is. Antle writes: Read More »

JAMES P. writes:

One might imagine that nursing mothers have no business in law enforcement, but no, according to The Washington Examiner, there are enough of them that the Washington D.C. police department has a “Lactation Accomodation Policy.” The officers were until recently permitted to do office work during their months nursing, but now they have been ordered by Chief Cathy Lanier to return to the streets to actually do their job. They are, however, offered the use of specially installed “lactation rooms.” Read More »