Drugs, a Misunderstood Industry

It’s funny. For the better part of a century we have had the Drug War, useful to politicians, heavily funded, but producing no results. Prices of drugs have remained about the same or gone down. Drugs are one of those things like poverty and climate change that everybody is against but that never change. The …

Rednecks, Even

There is a lot of snot and malice about rednecks on the internet. Most of it comes from such cornflowers and honeysuckles as college professors, other witless suburban nonentities, and assorted twits in cities. By “redneck,” these bundles of intellectual lingerie seem to mean anyone without a college degree who can hang a door or …

Posing in the Pluke Bucket:

The Fitty-Sedden Chevy was an American icon, like the flag, Babe Ruth, and McDonald’s. Boys figured that when their time on earth ran out, and they went to the great Southland in the sky, they’d find Elvis and Carl Perkins parked in front of the soda shop in a bad-ass Fitty-Sedden convisible — top down, …

The Maya: Who Would Have Thought It?

This is a repost of an old column that, given Congressional interest in militarily invading Mexico, may be of relevance. Inasmuch as America has a large population of Latin Americans, it seems to me that people, or some people, might want to know about them, and what they are, and where they came from. Most …

Twilight of the European Peoples

Living in Latin America, and having spent much of my working life in Asia, as well as many uears in the Potomac Rome, I now watch with considerable care the portentous and rapid currents of change in the world. I suppose the news business is an addiction. Perhaps there should be a twelve-step program. Yet …

“Because We Say So” The Case for Cultural Authority

 Parents of bright children learn the futility of argument over ill-advised desires of their offspring. A daughter of fourteen who wants to go to what predictably will be a drunken fraternity party will argue that they are really nice boys and daddy, you are prejudging, It isn’t fair,  you don’t even know them and she will …

Thoughts, Not Obsessively organized, on Diversity, an Atrocious Idea

Living as I do near Guadalajara I do not, thank God, see much television from the Great Squirrel Cage north of Mexico. When I do, I get the impression that America is four-fifths black and that all white women have black husbands. Whites apparently do not marry each other. My information is unreliable, but it appears that …