Category: Culture
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Are We at a Moment Before the Deluge?
Deal W. Hudson Published July 5, 2010 The phrase “Après moi, le déluge” is attributed to Louis XV on his deathbed. Fifteen years later, in 1789, the French Revolution confirmed his prediction: “After me, the flood.” Whether the king felt a sense of foreboding of things to come or simple indifference, the expression seems an…
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Bobby Jones Meets the President
Deal W. Hudson Last summer I had a supremely enjoyable day introducing my daughter to golf. As I watched her skip down the fairway with a cut-off five iron in her hand, I wondered if she would learn to love the game the way I did from my father. He helped teach me the hard…
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The Last Outpost of American Manners
DEAL W. HUDSON Published July 1,1995 The scene at the final hole at the Masters Golf Tournament—Ben Crenshaw weeping for joy, bent over, head in hands, while his caddy Carl Jackson comforts him. In that image many of us noticed something almost lost, nearly extinct, in American manners—the gratitude of a pious man who loves…
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A Culture Without Urbanity
Deal W. Hudson There were nights as a boy I was allowed to stay up late and watch Jack Paar on the Tonight Show which he hosted from 1957-1962. What I remember most about Paar’s style was his warm wit and sly charm but especially his gift for conversation, for creating a rapport and audience…
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Pro-Life Voters and the Culture
Deal W Hudson “Social conservatism” has long been the Good Housekeeping brand in pro-life politics. Its usefulness, however, has come to an end, not because the moral commitments it signifies are any less important, but because politics is about attracting voters. A new language that in no way compromises the principles of life, marriage, and…
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Taste Is No Mere Luxury
Deal W. Hudson I have not looked at Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for years until I started reading Peter Ackyrod’s new “retelling” in a sparkling prose which maintains the spirit and tone of the original Middle English verse. As Chaucer’s narrator describes his fellow pilgrims in the General Prologue, I was taken aback by two straightforward…
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Noah Meets the Transformers and Pretends to Be Abraham
Deal W. Hudson The very talented writer director Darren Aronofsky would have been well advised not to entitle his movie, Noah. This name raises reasonable expectations in a viewer, such as the movie be placed within a Judeo-Christian cosmology and to portray the chief spiritual struggle of the main character. “Aronofsky’s Noah” — a more…
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Why Dictators Start with the Culture
Deal W. Hudson In her 2012 study of the Soviet takeover after WWII of eight European countries, Anne Applebaum underscores how diligently the agents of Stalin, the Red Army, set out to transform the culture of every occupied nation (Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56). Applebaum notes that after the initial Soviet takeover…
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“Pavarotti, a Voice That Will Never Die”
Deal W. Hudson September 6, 2007 We all awakened this morning to the news that the greatest voice of our generation, Luciano Pavarotti, had died. The sound of his voice is something that I have carried inside my head since my early 20s, when I first heard him sing La Boheme at the Metropolitan Opera.…
Deal W. Hudson 