In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Ever since I read The Rich and the Super Rich: A Study in the Power of Money (1968) in the 1970s, I keep wanting to discuss it in various forums and chat rooms, but I'm always dismissed as a paranoid nut. The problem is that Lundberg's thesis is played out in plain view in daily life. It's encapsulated in the quote in the background of the photo at right (click on the image for a larger copy). His thesis is that America is dominated by a clique of 60 highly influential families -- let's stop right there. Critiques of his America's 60 Families (1937) complain that he never lists the 60 families he's talking about. This misunderstands Lundberg. He's a rhetorician, not a sociologist. His writing is brilliantly outrageous hyperbole -- the American people he characterizes as sansculottes and descamisados , which of course isn't literally true at all; many wear designer clothes, even the poor. He's speaking of their relative political power, which in ...

This was the title of Buckley associate Jeffrey Hart's obituary in the Washington Post in early 2019. Dartmouth classmates contacted me as soon as the news broke. I think it's fair to say that for the time he taught there, from the early 1960s to 1995, Hart in many ways was Dartmouth. By the time of his retirement, his lectures had to be held in the largest auditorium facilities available. I was always more ambivalent. I went to graduate school in English at the University of Southern California, where partly under Hart's influence, I specialized in eighteenth century. But early in my time there, the professors who became my mentors took me aside. They'd been looking at my Dartmouth transcripts and had seen all the courses I'd taken from Hart. They explained to me in not quite the same words that Hart was a public dilettante, someone not to be taken seriously. Indeed, one of those who spoke to me was Donald Greene, acknowledged at the time to be Mr Samuel Johnson...

Buckley died in early 2008, before the Obama phenomenon, but my fast answer is "yes".The more considered answer will take this post, one tomorrow, and possibly more. With his contemporary Hugh Hefner, he developed a new kind of persona in the 1950s, the publisher as public dilettante. His depictions in media rotuinely show him vamping and mugging for the camera to a remarkable degree, but it's always a question of tone and style, not substance. He espoused Catholicism, but he never did it with any particular rigor, and it's difficult to know if the Buckleys were Catholic in any readily distinguishable way from, say, the Kennedys. By the same token, the intellectul figures the National Review embraced included Edmund Burke, whom I've always tended to regard as another public dilettante. While his political writings are best known, he also wrote on the sublime (an essay that I think is better and more important than the other stuff). But he had no center, which i...

The proximate cause of my starting this blog was when, last Sunday night, A&E ran the Jason Bourne trilogy of films based on the Robert Ludlum novels. I never took any interest in Ludlum as a writer, and it wasn't until a few years ago when I saw The Bourne Ultimatum for the first time and recognized that, at least, with all the fights and explosions and car chases and stuff, it wasn't bad entertainmnet. But that was before Crossfire Hurricane and the peeing Russian hookers reached the national consciousness. We decided to record the whole trilogy when A&E ran it and watched all three over the next nights. What struck me was the image portrayed of the CIA throughout the three films, The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is th...

Whatever becomes of Donald Trump -- he's been declared done any number of times since 2015, remember -- it's worthwhile to keep in mind the remark attributed to Bismarck in this post's title. There's nothiing unique about Trump as a Republican. Abraham Lincon was regarded as an uncouth, insurgent, and divisive figure throughout his political career. The insurgent Republican tradition continues through Coolidge, Nixon, Goldwater, Reagan, and Newt Gingrich. In that context, there's nothing really new about Trump. I've tried to explain this to my Ivy League schoolmates to no avail. They won't even listen when I try to tell them how similar he is to Harry Truman. As Bp Robert Barron puts it, we've been here before, My friends want to maintain a picture of Trump independently whipping the population up into a frenzy of xenophobia and racism, ignoring the fact that legal immigrants and minorities support him in unprecedented numbers. The reality is that T...