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

 

25 Blogs

I am honored to be on Kurt Harden's list of 25 blogs guaranteed to make you smarter.

What a great group!

Kurt's Cultural Offering blog is a daily visit for me. A symbol of life well-lived.

[Photo by Sixteen Miles Out at Unsplash]

Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon

In The New Criterion in 2008, Joseph Epstein reviews some extraordinary memoirs. An excerpt:

At Versailles, information was the most precious of commodities. Those who were expert at gathering it were in the strongest position. As Jacques Revel puts it, “to gather information was both to maximize one’s chances and, just as important, to minimize one’s risks.” Gossip was of course a primary source of information and, as the Duc de Saint-Simon makes us realize, the natural outlet of a widely curious and genuinely critical mind. This le petit duc possessed in excelsis, and they had everything to do with making him a great writer and his Memoirs a landmark work.

[Photo by Elena Rabkina at Unsplash]

Hmm

 

High Tech Hides What "Old Tech" Revealed

Check out my Substack on what has been lost.

[Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar at Unsplash]

Big G.K.

In The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton begins his essay on "The End of the World" by noting his introduction to a new religion.

I was once sitting on a summer day in a meadow in Kent under the shadow of a little village church, with a rather curious companion with whom I had just been walking through the woods. He was one of a group of eccentrics I had come across in my wanderings who had a new religion called Higher Thought; in which I had been so far initiated as to realise a general atmosphere of loftiness or height, and was hoping at some later or more esoteric stage to discover the beginning of thought.