The Latest(ish)

New York City, Saturday—In Manhattan, they say, everyone wears black, but not this Saturday, not in this plaza just across from the U.N. The demonstrators, perhaps 500, perhaps more, have turned up on this briefly glorious late autumn day in orange hats, in orange scarves, in orange coats, in orange sweaters, draped in orange blankets, wearing orange ribbons; anything, however small, will do so long as it is orange. Baseball cap advertising Land Rover? No problem. If it’s orange, it’s fine. Sweatshirt proclaiming the virtues of Steinway pianos? Why not? It’s orange. Orange flags flutter, orange balloons bob against a [...]

It’s Time

November 29, 2004

National Review Online

Amid all the weird, wild wailing in Manhattan, amid the hot air and hysteria in Hollywood, amid all the crazy-lady shrieks of mainstream-media anguish (yes, Maureen, I’m talking about you) and the banshee howling of liberal complaint, Americans heard one overarching theme from the disappointed and distraught left—one meme, one fear, one insult that finally spoke its name. Jesusland (that’s what they call it now) had won. The America of Jefferson and Madison had fallen, delivered by Karl Rove into the hands of ranting theocrats, holy rollers and the monstrous ghost of William Jennings Bryan. Writing in the New York [...]

How Enlightenment Dies

November 12, 2004

National Review Online

All it takes for evil to prevail, warned Burke, is “for enough good men to do nothing.” True; but that doesn’t mean that the good men cannot occasionally relax with a good laugh or two. It might even help them, especially in a situation of the kind the West faces today: a war with an ideology so dedicated to the destruction of happiness that, in the shape of the Taliban, it made laughing too loud in public a crime. (For women, anyway.) In Florence of Arabia, his dark, disturbing, and very funny new satire, Christopher Buckley highlights the cruelty of [...]

Queen of The Desert

November 8, 2004

"Florence of Arabia," by Christopher Buckley; published originally in National Review