On the place and purpose of conversation in literary history. by James Como Samuel Johnson To begin, this quiz: who is the speaker of the long quotation below? Hint: it is one of the most famous fictional characters in the history of English letters. Another hint: early in the narrative, ...Read More...

by James Como Not long ago, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Arthur Sulzberger attacked Donald Trump for his use of the word ‘treason’ as directed against some elements of the press. A powerful, deadly accusation for Sulzberger, who, sanctimoniously, adduced the Constitution. The ...Read More...

by James Como  Our current civil war seems cultural, and therefore political, and threfore necessarily lapel-grabbing personal. Rarely does anyone on the Left attempt reasonable argument, or any persuasion; all is hortatory, imperative, urgent, condemnatory, dismissive. I used to think ‘progressives’ ...Read More...

by James Como Chaos seems to be the concept du jour and our president its avatar. Of course, anti-Trumpsters think it all – his election, his utterances, his decisions – accidental: there is no “policy” behind what he does, no thought-out strategy, merely ganglia beyond the control of intellect ...Read More...

by James Como Vladimiro Montesinos In August 2016, I wrote here of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK), who had been sworn in as Peru’s president a month earlier. I remarked that he looked especially tall because he is surrounded by pygmies. So far that observation has been vindicated. The Congress, ...Read More...

by James Como These days if I were to “take a knee” the crackling would wake the neighbors and there’s a good chance I wouldn’t make it back up, at least not for a while. I would be paying a price, as is the case, for example, when I (try to) genuflect at Mass, first leaning, then hoisting, on ...Read More...

by James Como Consider a (truncated) mind experiment directed towards the restoration of civil discourse, restoration, that is, of an age when, say, Bob Hope could joke about Dems and Johnny Carson about President Reagan without malice or as an attempt to destroy. It requires a paradigm shift, ...Read More...

by James Como Moral exhibitionism, self-righteous venting, potty talk, hitting and smashing – behaviors that when undertaken by children are called ‘acting out’ – these are all terrifically satisfying to, but also terribly distracting for, post-adolescent actors. Just so has #The Resistance been ...Read More...

by James Como We arrived on Thursday morning, my wife and I, one full day after the troubling national elections: Would Geert Wilders’ (“I don’t hate Muslims, I hate Islam”) PPV party prevail? More generally, would the ‘Far Right’ – what in the Netherlands is called by the Far Left the ‘alt-Right’ ...Read More...

by James Como It’s been a while since I’ve read the magnificent Golding allegory I allude to in my title, but last weekend my high regard for it was renewed. I’d been having a dollop of trouble tracking alt-Left gimmicks. For example, I’ve known it has grievances – indeed, ‘grievance’ is high ...Read More...

by James Como I can’t stand spinach; Hillary Clinton is beneath contempt. These are tastes. Spinach is not nutritious; Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted for dereliction of duty. These are opinions. Make all four approving instead of disapproving and they remain tastes and opinions. The most ...Read More...

Commies on Castro by James Como A happy day today, December 4th, 2016: Fidel Castro is being burned, his ashes stashed. Amidst a culture that, here and there, worries over micro-aggressions, one of the most egregious macro-aggressors – not least against his own people – has passed into Hell.  ...Read More...

and the power of definition by James Como Recently Senator Schumer made a threat: unless President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee was in the Mainstream, the Democrats would oppose him; this when the President-Elect was urged to name someone in the tradition of Antonin Scalia, who, apparently, was ...Read More...

by James Como 1.    How are the mayors and governors who support sanctuary cities, and who threaten to defend them as sancturies for undocumented immigrants against federal authority, not incipiently separatist – in fact, potentially rebellious? Nullification all over again? Is George Wallace chuckling ...Read More...

by James Como Last week at a dinner party in Manhattan I was, as usual, a right-of-center minority of one among a gaggle of progressives. Our hostess, a liberal lawyer of modulated expression, had imposed a No Politics rule, which we all followed, though at the price of one man (an academic) ...Read More...