Good Film for the Holidays

 

White Christmas

 

A Hard Truth

Steve Layman has a quote from a commencement address by Tom Brokaw that is, I'm sad to say, painfully accurate.

I continue to be stunned by the pettiness that often arises in even the most sophisticated circles.

To Be Re-Read and Re-Watched

 

Just In

 

The Christmas Movie Debate

Here's a list of contenders. Which ones are your top three picks?

1. A Christmas Carol with George C. Scott
2. A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen.
3. The Bishop's Wife
4. Die Hard
5. A Christmas Story
6. Charlie Brown's Christmas
7. Love Actually
8. How The Grinch Stole Christmas
9. Miracle on 34th Street
10. It's a Wonderful Life
11. Scrooge
12. The Polar Express
13. Home Alone
14. Elf
15. Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol
16. The Muppets Christmas Carol
17. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
18. Scrooged
19. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
20. Planes Trains and Automobiles
21. The Man Who Invented Christmas

[Photo by Michal Perchardo at Unsplash]

Very Nice and Much Appreciated

Julian Summerhayes is reading poetry on Substack.

[Photo by Andy Newton at Unsplash]

First Paragraph

This short book is not a comprehensive history of American liberalism. A number of important figures and episodes are merely glossed over. Instead, it rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think of liberalism today - the top-and-bottom coalition we associate with President Obama - began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of the post-World War I disillusionment with American society. In the Twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and the right. The aim of liberalism's founding writers and thinkers - such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken - was to create an American aristocracy of sorts, to provide the same sense of hierarchy and order long associated with European statism. 

- From The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class by Fred Siegel (2015)

The Workshop

I've taught an Equal Employment Opportunity workshop for several decades.

I keep being dragged back in.

On the other hand, it's a very good class and it helps to counter much of the nonsense that was peddled under the name of D.E.I.

Crank It Up