One of the least predictable publications in our country today has to be The American Conservative, which on the cover this month has a drawing of Rudy Giuliani, leading in the polls as a Republican candidate, in a staunchly Mussolini-esque pose. The issue includes a characteristically long and tightly argued piece from bloggy lefty Glenn Greenwald, who calls Giuliani "spectacularly unfit" for the Presidency.
This is a conservative publication?
Yours truly is also amazed by a long, thoughtful piece from the editor of Antiwar, Justin Raimondo, on the poet Robinson Jeffers, who is very much "out" these day, except perhaps among hard-core enviros.
Jeffers’ reputation never entirely recovered from his opposition to the US entry into WWII, which he saw as the beginning of the end for this country. But Raimondo points out that Jeffers opposition to world war dated back long before Hitler, to the 20’s, as seen in "Shine, Perishing Republic":
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
and home to the mother.
It’s a good point. But if the flower of democracy was fading then, what is it now? Rotting?
No wonder Jeffers isn’t popular these days.
Kit Stolz 