June 1993

Drunkenness and “debauchery” at a convention of naval aviators and their boosters! My, my, my! I hate to keep bringing up Claude Rains and his “shocked! shocked!” at gambling in Casablanca, but it seems to be the appropriate response for this nonsense. Drunkenness at a social hospitality suite at a convention! And in Las Vegas yet—that model city for strait-laced propriety! Hey, give me a break!

December 1994

Under the spell of a misplaced analogy from Darwinian theory, analysts for over a century liked to think of social change as necessarily gradual, minute, and glacial. The idea of any sort of radical or “revolutionary” social change became unfashionable among intellectuals and social scientists. The political and cultural revolutions of the twentieth century have altered that perspective, and observers are now more willing to entertain the idea of sudden revolutionary change.

February 1993

March 1993

September 1993

We instinctively knew it all along, but now it looks like it’s confirmed: our beloved president, William Jefferson Blythe IV Clinton, is indeed a bastard. It turns out that old rapscallion Bill Jeff Blythe III was still married to Wanetta Alexander when he allegedly tied the knot to Virginia Cassidy, who bears the enormous weight of historical guilt for giving birth to that Creep in the White House.

May 1994

I have to face it: my loathing of the Clintons and their administration is so intense that it has become absolute, unbounded, almost cosmic in its grandeur. As Clinton’s fortunes have gone on a continuing emotional rollercoaster, mine have been exactly inverse; when he’s up, I’m down, and vice versa. Whenever he takes a nose dive, to quote from the late Ben Hecht in a very different context, I make a little holiday in my heart.

March 1994

Writing in late January, it is already too clear that the fix is in, even more than usual, on the Academy Awards. The earlier awards, of the New York Film Critics Circle, the Golden Globes of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and other lesser lights, have presaged the main event.

July 1990

Directed by Guiseppe Tornatore with Philippe Noiret