Lovers of snow and cold are qualitatively different from the lovers of sun and surf; they are different moral beings altogether. Read the entire entry »

Men cut off from their origins and alienated from their selves become desperate, and desperate men do desperate deeds. Read the entire entry »

We have for so long asserted that we are a force for good in the world and that our efforts are in the service of "democracy" that we can no longer see the irony of a nation refusing to call itself an empire when in possession of military bases around the globe and expending nearly half our annual tax receipts on war efforts without foreseeable end. Read the entire entry »

A homogeneous global consumer culture flattens its victims. And, perhaps in the same vein, our meanderings around the dying furniture capital of Yecla turned up nothing: virtually everything on display fitted what has become the decorative style of contemporary Spain: the sort of stuff one might find in a Copenhagen dentist’s office. Read the entire entry »

We need not rely with some desperation on the Hope that is a gift, if we can gin up optimism of our own sort. Read the entire entry »

Obama is suffering because whether or not it is true, he seems not to understand what is going on around the country. Whether or not it is true, he seems uninterested in making his proposals understood. As a result, he seems distant – the kind of guy who doesn’t really get you as a person – and the first thing that he must use to bridge that seeming distance is speech. Read the entire entry »

Rock Island, IL If you walk the same route at about the same time every day, as I do, you develop a certain familiarity with the automobile culture that perfumes the public air. You can rattle off in your head the license plate of the red Ford coming your way, unless it’s that other red Ford, in which case you know that the driver, a somnambulant woman leaning into her steering wheel, mouth agape, is already, at this early hour, wearing her cell phone. You learn who attends to the road and who doesn’t— who’s double-thumbing a gadget or applying mascara or stuffing a Twelve-Cheese McCloggenStopper into his gaping maw as a talk radio jockey incapable of balance or symmetry fills the unfurnished commuter’s mind with the day’s permitted blather. You know the routes, the timing, the arrangement of the passengers. You know which of the cars coming toward you will pass you again the other way, and in how many minutes, just as you know which ones will speed by you and, in short order, speed back toward you again, the beloved children safely deposited in the care of strangers. Able-bodied high-schoolers from my neighborhood drive the same route this creaking arthritic ex-jock walks. The only people I share the sidewalks with are the hobos and the kids who aren’t old enough to drive yet. I get the feeling that I am more attentive to those around me than those around me are. If this is so, I expect it has something to do with the difference between being a walker and a driver, though I won’t go to the mat on this point. There are, I know, attentive drivers. Perhaps I flatter myself in thinking that I have been such a driver. But one person whom I know fairly well has whizzed by me for several years now apparently without any knowledge that there are sidewalks in this city, much less sidewalks used by someone he knows. That, or else he knows full-well whom he’s ignoring, and I am less liked than I think. Some folks do wave; others honk. One knows me and flips me off; later, around the coffee pot, he and I will exchange jokes, puns, etymologies, and classroom anecdotes. Some have never seen me before, though I can name their vehicles by make, model, and year and tell you their preferred headdress. Someone once threw a fountain drink at me. To acknowledge the gesture I permitted him a glimpse of one of my fingers. The vanity plates and bumper stickers are enough to keep a man amused for a lifetime. There’s the Hummer with a license plate that says “MR BIG D 5.” (If you’re going to lie about that, don’t you think you’d pick a bigger number?) It was on this route that I first saw the sticker: “My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Roll Student.” I’m sure the parents of the chess-club president are decent people, but I’m with the parents of the bully. I liked immediately the driver of a cancerous Toyota whose bumper sticker read: “Proud Parent of Inmate of the Month at County Jail.” And along my way I can, of course, wave to residents, should any appear on a porch, and also to the proprietors of a few local businesses, save Steve the barber, who on the first of January last year resolved to quit cigarettes and booze and by March was dead of a heart attack. The moral of that story, I assure you, was not lost on me, but Steve–may he rest in beery nicotined peace–no longer clips my mane or fills my ears with salty talk. I’ve noticed that more SUVs than Volvos have McCain-Palin stickers on them; likewise, more hybrids than pick-ups sport Obama-Biden stickers. But there they are, the liberals and conservatives alike, driving in formation, the difference between them being, near as I can tell, the size of the vacuum hose applied to their conscience—and into which corner of the conscience the hose has been shoved. The change in private behavior that I should so like to see I see nowhere. The price of gas does not alter behavior. The threat of a warming planet does not alter behavior. Illness and obesity do not alter behavior. Mind you: it’s not as if there’s no generosity in the world. I’ve been offered rides by floozies and pansies and concerned citizens who think I’ve been mistreated by an unreliable car. But I don’t seem to have inaugurated the transportation revolution I had hoped to launch back in 1996 when I first decided that I would live within walking distance of all the places I need to be. Many of my colleagues live in my neighborhood; all of them belong to the great mass of air-perfumers who motor by me each day. All of them want something done about global warming. As pissed as I am at those on the Right who are willing to risk rapid global climate change for the sake of living standards, I am equally pissed at those on the Left who think change is something other people make—people like corporations, for example, whom our Supreme Court has welcomed to the communion of our race. Private life proceeds apace: more flat screens in HD for Democrats, unlimited orange juice in January for Republicans, and another long day’s driving into night for both. I am frequently told that my dissent does no good. And this is true, I suppose, if measurability be the measure. But the evidence does seems to suggest that everyone’s capitulation to life in the fast lane does in fact, when added up, do considerable, not to mention measurable, harm. That alone, it seems to me, is reason to dissent as often as possible from the flat screens and the Orangensaft and the quick trips in the family hearse. If not, so be it. I will dissent nevertheless. But I offer “as often as possible” here in partial remittance for the debt I incur by my own complicity. Like everyone I know, I am the abject dependent of the automobile, the gas company, and distant producers of everything from bow-tie pasta to boxer shorts. Even I wouldn’t imitate me. But I would have us remake private life in this country. I would have us remake it in large steps and small, by piecemeal if also by policy. I would have, for starters, fewer fumes blasting the walkers of the world. I would have more people with driver’s licenses sharing the sidewalks with those too young to carry them. We who share the sidewalks would be sending those too young to drive a completely different message from the one they’re currently getting. And what if their attitudes toward HDTV and orange juice were to change? So I take as my example the automobile. It has become, for me, the emblem of sloth and moral turpitude. Civilized man has built the coach, said Emerson, but lost the use of his feet. That, I think, was a gentle remark. I suffer from two bad knees and a scorching case of plantar fasciitis that scarcely gives me a moment’s respite. And yet in the pelting snowy wind and sub-zero temperatures I hoof it in each day. Such is the pact I made with myself several years ago. And now I honestly wonder: who would willingly ruin a morning blizzard or a thunderstorm by getting into a motorized vehicle? Drive rather than walk through snow or lightening? Are you kidding me?… Read the entire entry »

This will not last. Greed consumes everything, until it finally consumes itself. Read the entire entry »

In 1973, the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton abortion decisions. Together, they represented a serious defeat for the unalienable right to life, the constitutional system of federalism, and the principle of democracy. Read the entire entry »

A friend of mine with a penchant for self-effacement said “There’s just not enough time to get the work done and procrastinate.” It is not that he only works well under pressure, he only works under pressure. He reads voraciously in history and poetry when neglecting his dissertation, and (to be honest) drinks too many gins and tonic over good conversation. In our modern age his habits fall under the general category of wasting time, along with, well, just about everything not productive or immediately relating to a “useful” end. Read the entire entry »

Rock Island, IL Obviously there is a fortune out there waiting to be made by someone who can take well-known poems and re-write them for discriminating readers. Poets are already living high off the hog; I see no reason that parodists shouldn’t also. My own attempt, The World’s Best-Loved Poems Improved Upon, soon to be published by Rolling & Doe, should give poetry lovers hours of delight and quality reading. It should also allow me to quit my night job as troll-slayer at FPR and move into the Projects in northwest Rock Island. (I considered rewriting America’s favorite Christmas carols, but the thought of seeing my book reviewed by a certain formidable and learned Doctor of Divinity dissuaded me. I am a man of very thin skin.) The idea for this book came about one day when I was reluctantly doing a unit on the Beats in my American Lit class. I realized that I could make shorter work of the misery by rewriting certain major poems of the Beat movement. I don’t want to give away too much of my work—there are copyright issues at stake, after all—but a good example is this slight variation on Ginsberg’s masterpiece, “Howl,” which variation, I think most readers will agree, demonstrates that simplicity and subtlety do often go together:

I saw the best minds of my generation
Ah, forget it.

That Coleridge was an opium addict is well-known. It did not seem impertinent to me, therefore, to take one of his odes and recast it. I won’t reproduce the poem here, but the title, “This Lime-Wedge Drink My Prison,”… Read the entire entry »

Here is the great secret of my generation: What our parents gave us as a gift we have received as an entitlement. No one is not grateful for an entitlement. Indeed, everyone is resentful that it is not larger. Worse, we are resentful of everybody else's entitlements because they compete with our own. Politics because a matter of getting as large a share of the pie as you can, while giving as little as you can get away with. Read the entire entry »

Editor’s note: This piece, by a well-known professor in the Netherlands, originally appeared in the Dutch daily newspaper Trouw (January 2, 2010). The Front Porch Republic article that Kennedy references is also soon to appear in the well-known Polish conservative magazine Fronda. Amersfoort, The Netherlands. In the last few weeks, when our streets and sidewalks were dusted with snow, I sprang up with snow shovel in hand, and went outside to clear the sidewalk. I w… Read the entire entry »

Hillsdale, MI.  Cultures banging at each other is rarely a pretty sound.  A good friend in Kabul recently told me that Afghans call us “kaffir feringhees,” which translates roughly, foreign assholes.   I’ve been called a lot worse, and, God help me, I’ve called others a lot worse. Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible inspires these thoughts, and makes me think of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.  Cather’s is the best novel I have ever read.  Kingso… Read the entire entry »

Henry County, Kentucky.  If the young artists I know have any overmastering desire, besides becoming famous, it is to be original.  And by that they typically mean creating something new and different, doing something not done before.   I don’t wish to overstate the matter, as there is a lot of art from the last hundred years to love.  But in general, given the mood of our age and also several thousand years’ worth of artistic predecessors (who have already disc… Read the entire entry »

Rock Island, IL In 1923 Upton Sinclair published a book on education titled The Goose-Step. It began thus: “Six hundred thousand young people are attending colleges and universities in America. They are the pick of our coming generation; they are the future of our country. If they are wisely and soundly taught, America will be great and happy; if they are misguided and mistaught, no power can save us.” I am interested in these words not in relation to their own context, for much… Read the entire entry »

Devon, PA. My old friend and classmate, Jeremiah Chamberlin, writes in to the FPR ombudsman of a new venture he has undertaken to help support, save, or at least treasure, local bookstores.  It has been more than a decade since the massive expansion of Borders Books and Barnes and Noble fueled the inferno of the little local shops that had served as outposts and meeting places of literary culture for decades.  Those two large chains paid painful tribute to such stores by steali… Read the entire entry »

Here are some portions of my analysis of Sarah Palin and populism that are not included in my book review essay that appears in The American Conservative. Read the entire entry »