Staring at your phone won’t make for a rich or exciting life, but at least you’ll be happy for a while. The post The Dumb and Joyful Masses appeared first on The American Conservative .
Takimag The Dumb and Joyful Masses Staring at your phone won’t make for a rich or exciting life, but at least you’ll be happy for a while. TakiMag Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who wrote the great Madame Bovary novel, among other lesser ones. A close friend of his once wrote to him asking for advice on happiness, and Gustave wrote back offering his fail-proof method to achieving joyfulness: “One needs good health, and also good luck. And of course stupidity, but if the last one’s missing, all’s lost.” Good old Gustave, he certainly knew things. If he were around today, he’d be finding some very happy people…Open
History’s winners take a beating at the movies. The post The Ancient Greeks’ Blackened Reputation appeared first on The American Conservative .
Takimag The Ancient Greeks’ Blackened Reputation History’s winners take a beating at the movies. TakiMag (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images) My friend Michael Mailer is an extremely talented film director and producer, most recently of Cutman and Little Audrey, the latter a true story about a little girl that created miracles. Michael’s father, the novelist Norman Mailer, taught me how to headbutt, and when I asked him if there was brain damage involved, he looked nonplussed. “Writers have harder heads than normal people,” he said. Be that as it may, Norman was a frustrated movie director. He…Open
The horrors of war are a recurring theme in the great Western art of the last century. The post Antiwar Art for Conservatives appeared first on The American Conservative .
Culture Antiwar Art for Conservatives The horrors of war are a recurring theme in the great Western art of the last century. By now, the argument has a bleak familiarity: Conservatives lack the toolkit to make good art, and all too often they lack the perception to recognize good art. Something like this position has been sketched in countless think pieces, including a recent one in First Things (“Why Can’t Conservatives Create Art?”), and has been substantiated through such regrettable ventures as the substitute Super Bowl halftime show led by Kid Rock. Last year, in these very pages, I reviewed a book whose title sums up…Open
My veteran father taught me not to get swept away by military fervor. The post Never for War appeared first on The American Conservative .
Foreign Affairs Never for War My veteran father taught me not to get swept away by military fervor. I was about two months shy of my eighth birthday when the Gulf War began in January 1991, but my memory of it, and of my father’s stern admonition against war-making in general and that war in particular, left me with enough antiwar spirit to last a lifetime. As improbable as it may sound, given how young I was, I still remember the eruption of the war on the television in my family’s living room. The personages on our side were rather memorable: Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, TV reporters Peter Arnett and Arthur Kent, singer Whitney…Open
Expect no great man of letters to emerge from the bloodied fields of Iran. The post The End of the War-Hero Writer appeared first on The American Conservative .
Culture The End of the War-Hero Writer Expect no great man of letters to emerge from the bloodied fields of Iran. Modern warfare does not a good movie make. Nor a good book, I suspect. Drones zipping about like flies and being chased by other drones and interceptors are not the same as John Wayne charging with his Marines onto the beach at Iwo Jima, not to mention Gary Cooper as Sergeant York picking off the Germans on the Western Front. Old-style warfare tended to get the creative juices flowing throughout history. Papa Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald became stars following the First World War, with their war-background books, as did…Open