Thousands of flags pierce the earth, filling hundreds of acres of greenery with staffs of bronze and spears of gold, until every headstone and cross of stone, until every Star of David and star and crescent has a flag, until the land looks like a miniature battlefield; not a scene for Lilliputians, but a burial
Forget 1984, and focus on 1999: the year “The Matrix” debuted in theaters. Is it possible that Xi Jinping, the current president of China, saw the film during its original run, and was so inspired by the image of one person, one pod—of all the world’s peoples stripped, stacked, and sedated in isolation chambers—that he
To suggest that products produce themselves, to suggest that the means of production work without workers, to suggest that we can animate the inherently inanimate, that we can automate quantity and achieve the highest quality—that suggestion is one of several reasons why some of the richest people are the poorest communicators. That suggestion is why
About those amber waves of grain, above the fruited plain: If trial lawyers get their way, there will be bread and circuses aplenty but little or no actual bread, because trial lawyers stand to make plenty of bread without baking a single loaf; because trial lawyers stand to collect a lot of dough without kneading
Imagine two liars committed to the same lie for different reasons. Imagine telling half the world communism is the wave of the future, while the other half believes there is no future without Communism. Imagine learning that both feared they were wrong because the price was too high, the burden too heavy, the hardship too
The office of president of the United States is an impeachable offense. The offenders constitute a gallery of rogues and realists, a monument to men whose names we honor in marble and exalt unto a mountainside. That they were not impeached is a good thing, no matter the gravity of their high crimes and misdemeanors,
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for all freedom-loving people to stop people whose mission in life is a suicide mission against Christians and Jews, to stop people from burning the world’s oldest churches and bombing a people whose faith forces them to endure the world’s oldest hatred—when we act to
Irony did not die in a fireball of Islamic rage. It did not end on the 11th day of the 9th month of a new century. It did not expire when 19 disciples of the 7th century killed 2,977 innocents born in the 20th century. Irony died a less infamous death when politicians killed all
What site could be more sacred, what sight could be more sorrowful, what monument could be more metaphorical than reality itself, than the burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral? What more warning do we need than the flames from a fire in Paris, from a church desecrated during the French Revolution and nearly destroyed, today,
This is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message. I'll get back to you. I’ll get back to you, as Lyndon Johnson used to get back to members of Congress. Not in reprisal, but through a series of rituals—through an auditory exercise of the rites of power—where Johnson used the phone in
