Category Archives: Culture

Try to imagine the reverse: armed and decked out Taliban fighters patrolling your street, talking to your family. What would your reaction be?

I spent many years poring over the history of the British colonies in America, trying to understand the experience of the young George Washington, which I wrote about in For King and Country, and of the Scotch-Irish, which I chronicled in West From Shenandoah. Over and over again I was appalled by the stunning ignorance of British military and political leaders about the native peoples from whom they were trying to wrest control of a continent. I was even more appalled to discover that the ignorance — compounded by a total lack of curiosity — continues among most Americans today.

When the British negotiated land sales and treaties with a people who had no regard for the written word but revered, remembered and honored the spoken word (their entire history was an oral history), and when the British altered in their favor the written summary of a council decision and congratulated themselves when the principals “signed” it (an act with no significance for the tribes whatsoever), the stage was set for future carnage. The principals walked away from the deal believing in radically different outcomes.  Continue reading →

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“Once upon a time,” is not a suitable opening for a news story. Ever.

We are spending more and more of our time trapped in other peoples’ narratives — and by narratives I don’t mean just stories. Let me explain with an example.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I got an excited call from the editor of a magazine I wrote for. The Feds were about to de-list the American alligator from the endangered species list. After fewer than 20 years on the list the population had rebounded almost magically, proving the efficacy of the list. This was a huge story for conservationists, and I was to go get it.

It was February. The assignment was in Florida. He got no argument from me. Problem was, the story he sent me to get was dead on arrival. Continue reading →

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Maybe it took a Donald Trump to demonstrate to us how saturated with lies and cowardice American life has become. He didn’t start it, he just raised it — correction, lowered it — to a depraved art form.

Mother Culture sings to us (from the big screen in the living room and the little one in our hand, they’re all on the same umbilical cord) around the clock about what is happening in the world and what our lives should be like, and almost all of it is lies. From the bikini model who says she lost 180 pounds effortlessly by eating granola, or something; to the announcer who shouts that you could have perfect, all-inclusive health care insurance with no co-pays or deductibles and not even have to pay for it; to the goofball insurance purveyors each of whom insists that they are the cheapest (“No we are! No we are! No….); to the cell phone company that insists it has converted its entire national network to 5G technology; to the pleasant elderly dolts who insist they are smarter than they look because they medicate with something made from jellyfish; and on and on and they are all lies. And those are just the commercials.Liar liar Continue reading →

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It might look like an old threshing machine to you. It was my starship, pirates’ galleon, stagecoach, fort, submarine, B-25 bomber and fighter jet.

When I was a child on the farm, time stretched out before me, infinitely long, wide and deep — or so it seemed then. My mother and father worked like draft animals from dawn to dark, and even after I was old enough to assume the appropriate load of chores, most of my time was on my own hands. There were no flickering screens in our house, not even in the living room, until I was 10 or 12. There was no corner to hang out on, not for at least five miles of dirt road.  

No matter. In the back corner of the farmyard sat an old abandoned thresher, an elephant-sized hulk of sheet metal and cast iron with ladders, a catwalk, what looked like a ship’s wheel, and some child-sized compartments. It was my starship, pirates’ galleon, stagecoach, fort, submarine, B-25 bomber and fighter jet. I didn’t go to movies, I made them, with no limitations whatsoever on special effects and casting.  Continue reading →

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I finally got my cigarette smoking under control, after decades of a pack a day, when I realized that for me it was not a matter of addiction, but of habit. (I speak here only for myself.  I’m not preaching, I’m just remembering something that I experienced.) A few times, by accident, I was deprived of cigarettes for a substantial period of time and nothing bad happened, physically. I kept reaching to the pocket where I kept them, kept snapping open the lighter, but for me the internal craving was far less than the pull of accustomed things to do with my hands when the coffee was served, or the meal was over, or — you know.

Treating it as a bad habit allowed me to get the upper hand, and quit. Similarly, there have been times in my life when over a period of time I was consuming far too much alcohol. Again, when circumstances showed me I could abstain without any physical consequences, and I decided I was dealing with habit — a ritual, really, performed only before, during and after meals and before bedtime (for ever more extended periods of time before and after and then the time in between as well) — I was able to get it under control without severe consequences in my life. Again, I’m not recommending this to anyone else, just saying it worked for me.

Now it seems something very much like that is happening to our entire society, because of the pandemic — the accident that deprives us of some things we assumed were essential to our lives, and now are looking sort of silly. Continue reading →

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Come fly with me, you said. This is gonna be our dream vacation .

Dreams (not the ones that come in sleep, but the ones we hold close day after day) come in various sizes and intensities. From the biggest to the least of them, they beckon us into an uncertain future, giving flickering illumination to features of the landscape right at the horizon of the knowable, letting us know there’s a reason we struggle, a place worth getting to. In America today, dreams are an endangered species.

To start with the biggest and broadest, the American Dream — that if you work hard and play by the rules you can become anything you want to be — is dead. In today’s America, if you work hard and play by the rules you might keep your job flipping burgers, but you’ll need at least one and maybe two other jobs just to afford a place to live. Forget retiring to Florida. As a matter of fact, forget retiring. The good news is, with the pandemic you might not live that long anyway. In America today, it is still true that any young person can grow up to be president — as long as that person was born a billionaire.  Continue reading →

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General George S. Patton directing operations in North Africa. “I’m not interested in dying for my country,” he said once, “I’m interested in making the other sonsofbitches die for their country.”

In one of the best scenes in a remarkable movie — the multiple-Academy-Award-winning Patton — one of the best generals in American history, George S. Patton, is portrayed (by Geoge C. Scott) as defeating the legendary German commander Erwin Rommel (“the Desert Fox”) in a pivotal tank battle in North Africa in 1943. Surveying the smoking battlefield afterward, an exultant Patton roars, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!”  

So Patton must be suspect, right? I mean, reading a book by a Nazi?  Continue reading →