“What are we to make of Allen Ginsberg, and of Howl, on the 70th anniversary of its publication? The poem seems to belong more to popular culture than high culture, closer to Elvis or Easy Rider or ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ than Elizabeth Bishop or John Berryman. … Ginsberg’s magnum opus is brash, insistent, and unsubtle. It has never attracted the kind of critical scrutiny that other 20th-century poetry has …. Changing sexual mores have done to the Beats in this century what sniffy articles in National Review and Partisan Review failed to do in the last one: made them uncool, cringey, Bad Boyfriend Literature. … But Howl endures, and part of what keeps it alive these seven decades on is its pure musical quality. … it is perhaps the best-sounding American poem of the century.” (10/19/26)
“A Canadian friend of mine, who is currently teaching in China, recently sent me an interesting video. It recorded a dark-skinned man who spoke perfect English, telling how he and his family, in 1996, immigrated to Canada. They ‘went through the process’, legally, to become Canadian citizens, working hard, earning what they got, and honoring the country. That kind of immigrant most countries don’t mind having. But, he said, ‘it was a whole lot different back then’. The man on the video was very respectful and said, several times, in his two-minute video, ‘I say this very respectfully’. But his message was, ‘When you come to Canada, please stop doing s**t; it makes the rest of us look bad’.” (10/19/26)
“In battleground races across the country, Republicans have lost access to one of the president’s most salient — and longstanding — campaign slogans.” (10/19/26)
“All Iran must do to win is to survive. It has done so. The monstrously swollen heads in Washington and Jerusalem did not dream that would happen. They committed the fundamental error of believing their own ridiculous propaganda and in so doing committed a crime and worse, as they say, a blunder. So Trump’s useless fulminations against Iran will continue, but the jig is up, because Washington can’t win against either Tehran or Moscow, whom it has thrown into each other’s arms. Along, of course, with China.” (10/19/26)
“Donald Trump first came to Americans’ attention more than 20 years ago for gleefully firing all manner of people on his show The Apprentice. Today, even as every poll indicates that if there’s one person Americans most want fired, it’s Trump himself, Trump’s own orgy of discharges continues apace. In the past week, both our ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Trump’s blink-and-you-miss-her press secretary, Katie Zacharia, have been exited out. (Enterprising news producers might want to accompany the story of Zacharia’s in-and-out tenure with clips of Groucho Marx’s entrance song in Animal Crackers: ‘Hello, I Must Be Going.’) The well-earned departure of these two Trump loyalists has also prompted stories on Trump’s proclivity for firing his female appointees when he thinks they’ve betrayed him or otherwise let him down, while leaving in place his even more dubious male appointees.” (10/19/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Peter Van Buren
“The struggle over who is better at the job, political appointees or careerists, will never conclusively end. It has been a factor of American diplomacy for decades, under all flavors of administrations. The mainstream media negatively focus on some of Trump’s ambassadorial choices, but to anyone familiar with diplomacy it is nothing more than another round in a century-old political argument. The new question, unique to the second Trump administration, is whether or not the president should appoint anyone at all, career or political, to a particular ambassadorial job. … Ambassadors are increasingly curiosities left over from the 19th century, a past when Washington, DC, needed trusted representatives empowered to make decisions a world away. Embassies as they exist today were created for a world without Zoom, encrypted messaging, presidential and cabinet travel, celebrity special envoys, global media reporting, and easy direct leader-to-leader calls.” (10/19/26)
“President Trump’s protectionism gives Ameircans the same ‘protection’ that the wolf gave to the lamb. The Food and Drug Administration and Customs Border Protection will effectively ban almost all personal prescription imports in January. Millions of Americans who rely on Canadian pharmacies will be whipsawed by higher prices. The new policy is spurred by Trump’s hostility to Canada and his devotion to protecting Big Pharma profits.” (10/18/26)
“What in the world is going on? Why are Western publics so disillusioned with liberalism? Why gravitate to authoritarian populism, which is invariably corrupt, repressive, and incompetent? Why now, when Western countries are objectively richer and safer than any time before the end of the Cold War—if not ever? … While no one disputes that liberal governments committed mistakes and oversights, none of their failings explains, much less justifies, the movement of an enviably privileged electorate like Germany’s toward a party like AfD.” (10/18/26)
“Several persons within and around the executive branch of Florida’s government conspired to misappropriate $10 million in taxpayer money, funnel that money through a charity founded by the governor’s wife, give it to Political Action Committees operated by the future state attorney general, and spend it to rig an election. … Courts can expunge reports, but once the truth is out, it stays out.” (10/18/26)
