George Case's Blog, page 8

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“Today’s music ain’t got the same soul,” Bob Seger sang in 1979’s “Old Time Rock and Roll.”  By “today’s music,” did he mean Pink Floyd’s The Wall, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, Neil Young’s Live Rust, The Police’s Regatta de Blanc, or Bob Marley’s Survival?  By most measures, those are pretty soulful records, or at least records […]

While I totally get the alarms raised by the Trump minions’ invocations of “alternate facts” and “fake news,” I must admit that some of their calculated avoidance of reality has been enabled by the way all of us consume reportage and information today.   Many citizens, me included, now get most of our accounts of […]

Being skeptical of provocative claims, these days, can make you seem at best a killjoy – “Hey, it’s just harmless speculation” – and at worst a sucker – “Oh, so you’ve bought into the official narrative, have you?” And there are a lot of topics to be skeptical about, from a lot of angles, ranging […]