George Case's Blog, page 8

Immoral Equivalencies

Someone should give Anthony Rota a history lesson. He’s the Member of Parliament for North Bay Ontario, and up until recently Speaker of the House of Commons, who last week introduced his constituent, 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, as a “Ukrainian-Canadian war veteran” and a “Canadian hero,” in the Parliamentary gallery during a state visit from Ukrainian […]

Shine On

Stephen King’s 1977 classic The Shining, which I’ve reread every few years since 1980, retains my vote as the writer’s masterpiece.  I’m hardly alone here, but such has been King’s output over a nearly fifty-year career that this, only his third published novel, has sometimes been overshadowed by the sheer abundance of his other work. […]

Shred the News

One useful description of today’s cultural fragmentation is the term epistemic crisis, which numerous observers have invoked to sum up the disbelief millions of people harbor towards each other’s truths. When no authority – no public official, no media outlet, no system of knowledge – is universally accepted as neutral or objective, we are surely […]

John Barleycorn Must Die

Ours is a society with a deeply conflicted attitude towards drinking.  We are far more cognizant than previous generations of the disease of alcoholism, of the dangers of drunk driving, and of the vulnerability of young female drinkers at parties or nightclubs.  “Please drink responsibly,” chide the ads.  Yet we continue to romanticize hangovers and […]

Victims of the Fury

Many commentators, including me, have raised objections to the overzealous “cancel culture” of progressive politics. The moral certainty, the rejection of dialogue or debate, and the language of reckoning and revolution which characterize today’s wokeness advocacy are rightly seen as affronts to the freedom of speech and thought fundamental in a healthy pluralism. Yet the […]

Populism and Pop

This season’s episode of publicity and show business spilling over into the field of sober editorial commentary concerns not a blockbuster movie, a banned book, or a brand of beer, but a country music single.   The controversy over Jason Aldean’s hit “Try That In a Small Town” – the song and its video have […]

Meme What You Say

They’re no doubt old news by now, but our current bout of self-quarantine and the consequent surge in screen time has given me an appreciation for the novel medium of the meme.  Memes are the visual one-liners which abound on the internet, the pithy combinations of image and text which have become our postmodern equivalent […]

Ceaselessly Into the Past

A while ago I was re-reading some short stories by one of my favorite authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I was struck again by the old-fashioned chasteness of his characters and their culture.  Considered daringly progressive in his day, Fitzgerald’s portraits of young people during the 1910s and 20s now read like discovering one’s grandparents […]

Our Possible Pasts

Though there have been many counterfactual histories premised on alternative scenarios of World War II, among them Philip K. Dick’s The Man In the High Castle (1962), Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978), and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), my vote for the most convincing goes to Robert Harris’s 1992 thriller Fatherland.  Set in the […]

History Shows Again and Again

The contemporary drive to reassess – and often replace – the traditional, Eurocentric, patriarchal versions of history and historic figures, however earnest, may carry unforeseen risks. Taking down statues, amending school curricula, and renaming buildings, streets, and sports teams in accordance with the latest political standards sounds like progress, until we begin to consider why the statues, curricula, and names […]