Ricochet.com is the leading place for civil discussion of the center-right and beyond.
Join today for less than the price of a cup of coffee!
Recommended by R> Members Treating the Body Politic
I’m not a doctor but I know enough about medicine to know that a fever is not an illness in itself but a symptom of a larger underlying problem. And right now, America has a raging fever.
Most fevers are caused by infections. The political and punditry classes have diagnosed the problem as Donaldus Trumpitis, a relatively new disease some are describing as a cancer. But more likely than not, this case of the DTs is not the disease itself but just the manifestation of the fever.
More
A few weeks ago, President Trump again threw the country into a tizzy by declaring a ban on transgender people in the military. Everyone was surprised, including James Mattis, Secretary of Defense. A number of factors seemed to contribute to Trump’s decision, including contradictory ones. I’d like to explore some of those here, and also explain the reasons why his decision may actually benefit not only the military, but this nation.
The obsession of our popular culture with beauty has come to a tragic form of heroism. Celebrities in hearfelt and simultaneously over-produced pop songs assure the children who are their ideal audience that they are beautiful people. This assurance against evidence is premised on the knowledge that everyone is the same and that the effective truth of uniqueness is anonymity.
The orgy of statue demolition by thugs posing as the country’s racial watchdogs has generated predictable reactions from ideological purists left and right, and stirred ripples of concern among most Americans. Suddenly, national attention is focused on selected personages whose views on race relations likely differed little from those held by most Americans, North and South, during their time. No matter; they fought for the side defending slavery, which now requires the sort of historical cleansing that would warm the heart of any dedicated Stalinist.
SimpliSafe
Casper
Zip Recruiter
Comerica Park is home to the Detroit Tigers of Major League Baseball’s American League. Like so many of today’s stadiums Comerica has a “Monument Park” celebrating players of the past. There are six graven images in granite, all capturing for all-time Tiger greats performing some act of skill. The complete player Al Kaline is stretched toward the heavens making one more impossible catch. Left hander Hal Newhouser is leaned back at the end of his wind-up before delivering a strike out pitch. Charlie Gehringer is in the middle of another fluid turn of a double play. Sluggers Hank Greenberg and Willie Horton are sending one more over fence. The figures reach 13 feet in height and are fenced off from an admiring public.
Today, my oldest son came home after serving a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Oklahoma City area. To say I can’t adequately express my happiness at his return would be an understatement.
Away Travel
Bombfell
The Great Courses
I will close this series with two brief explanations of how genre itself involves reflections on American society. I have recently been working on horror movies, so that is one of my examples. American horror comes down to two versions of an attack on progress. One is Christian — Hitchcock did it, his many imitators since John Carpenter do it, and endless others. These stories try to put together the universal and the particular in this way. They start with a social setting that is very broad and designed to show what’s happening with American freedom. They then move on to an individual story of the emergence of evil. How crazily implausible evil has become, and how maddening, therefore, is supposed to teach the audience that they didn’t see evil in the setting. The unwillingness of good respectable middle-class Americans to see the evil in their hearts, and therefore in their society, leads them to countenance or even provoke monstrous things.