by Fred Reed
Once upon a time there was a fairy kingdom that lived inside a place called The Beltway, and was surrounded on all four sides by a land called America. The Beltway was aligned with another kingdom called Manhattan, inhabited by disembodied heads that spoke from the walls of bars, and with yet another closed kingdom …
The tall scrawny freak with the red hair converted in the spring of 1972, several months before Jerry wandered, roaring, onto the scene. I had recently graduated from both Vietnam and college and, not knowing what else to do, was living with a collection of hippies at Stafford Court House, Virginia. The other freaks were …
This column contains everything there is to know about economics. Hereafter it will be possible to shut down university deprtments and stop talking about Keynes and the Austrian School, to the great relief of mankind. In gratitude you can send me your childrens’college funds. In 1850 people all lived on farms and grew food, which …
So the other day I was thinking, which I know better than to do, and started pondering the American economy, which ain´t got the chance of a frog in a French restaurant. Nobody else´s does either. It´s just that we got there first. Start with work. Just about nobody likes it. I hear folk like …
Dawn comes to the alleys around Tan Son Nhut Field with a faint grey light seeping past the graveyard and up the dusty road toward the banana market. Pots begin to clatter and red charcoal dims in brightening court-yards. A hungry dog sniffs in the ditch. A cyclo, a motor-driven coal scuttle equally useful as …
T’other day I walked up the holler to ask Uncle Hant about space aliens. It’s because Hant knows everything ? most nearly. It was spring and birds were hooting and hollering in the rail cut through the woods to Hant’s place and bugs were shrieking. The he-bugs, anyway. They rub their legs together like fiddle …
You gotta understand the grip Elvis has on the automobile-loving basically Iro-Celtic libido of the southern United States. Maybe you think Presley was just the first white rock-n-roll singer. Naw. He’s a state of mind. Anybody who has spent time in the smoky evening fields of the Mississippi Delta, where people talk slow like sorghum …
In May of 2018, the second year of Mrs. Clinton’s administration, national puzzlement was high over the continuing wave of mass killings. A week before, nineteen children had died in the Blaintree Kindergarten massacre in San Francisco when Mohammed Shah Massoud, Faisal ibn Saud, and Hussein al Rashid burst into the school and began firing. …
I wonder whether Americans realize just how closely the United States is coming to resemble a country of the Third World, not just in its corruption and attributes of a police state, but in the incompetence of governmental bureaucracies. Federal agencies don’t work. They are rotted by affirmative action. The bureaucrats are inattentive, unaccountable, anonymous, …
I’m gonna do it anyway. Being as I’m just a West Virginia boy, and mostly barefoot, and don’t have much sense, a lot of folk say, maybe I shouldn’t be explaining the world. But the world don’t make even as much sense as I do, so guess I’ll stick my fork in. Sometimes I go …