Samuel P. Huntington

Samuel Huntington, a prophet for the Trump era By Carlos Lozada

President Trump’s recent speech in Warsaw, in which he urged Europeans and Americans to defend Western civilization against violent extremists and barbarian hordes, inevitably evoked Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” — the notion that superpower rivalry would give way to battles among Western universalism, Islamic militance and Chinese assertiveness. In a book expanded from his famous 1993 essay, Huntington described civilizations as the broadest and most crucial level of identity, encompassing religion, values, culture and history. Rather than “which side are you on?” he wrote, the overriding question in the post-Cold War world would be “who are you?”
So when the president calls on the nations of the West to “summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization,” when he insists that we accept only migrants who “share our values and love our people,” and when he urges the transatlantic alliance to “never forget who we are” and cling to the “bonds of history, culture and memory,” I imagine Huntington, who passed away in late 2008 after a long career teaching at Harvard University, nodding from beyond.

America first, Romania second

Astazi, in contextul agitat al momentului, am primit un clip video. Greu de spus ce, cum pentru ce, de ce, par sa fie niste printscreenuri dupa un video mai amplu.

America first, Romania second

 

 

Pe drum

Driving America by    Jacob Hoerger

“Keep straight for 440 miles,” the GPS directed as we made the bend off I-35 onto I-90. Vera was to my left behind the wheel; Lera and Zoë sat in back. The three of them were in the U.S. as foreign-language instructors (German, Russian and French, respectively) at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. I did my best to try to match their whoops and buzz as we struck out from the Twin Cities, but for me this was going to be a different kind of trip. The terrain that lay ahead was not unknown. Two years prior, just after graduating from a different small Minnesota college, three classmates and I went touring in South Dakota. The landscapes on that trip were overlaid with the afterglow of senior-year triumphs and the words of a college sweetheart. That glow only grew in my mind once I slotted into a dismal desk job in the “real world.” In those two years, though, I’d failed to get anything published (journalism was the career I’d hoped for), the girl had said goodbye and I’d begun bouncing around the country with a clichéd bout of post-collegiate bucket-listlessness. To revisit this territory meant having to sit still in the shadow of unfulfilled aspirations. Plus, I was coming down with a cold.

An hour outside the Cities we parked at a rest stop, stepped outside the car and received our first blast of steady wind from the west. Hats flew off and we took pictures. Back in the vehicle, we opened up a CD gifted to Zoë by a friend. (“Enjoy the road trip!” they had scrawled on the packaging). It was an album called “All Possible Futures” by the band Miami Horror. The album cover showed a couple of friends with their feet dangling out the back of a convertible. The opening number, “American Dream,” was a light, creamy track featuring a krautrock drumbeat, slick keyboards and airy vocals soaked in reverb repeating “American dream, won’t you listen to yourself?”

Cauză şi efect

How voters’ personal suffering overtook reason — and brought us Donald Trump By Leon Wieseltier

On a sleepless night last winter — insomnia being an intelligent response to the condition of our country — I turned on the television and found “The Deer Hunter.” As I watched the extraordinary first hour of the film — the steel mill and its fiery floor; the homely tavern with its clinking beer bottles and its crooning jukebox; the VFW hall festooned for a wedding with a banner that proclaimed “serving God and country”; the Russian Orthodox church, its onion domes reaching stubbornly for the heavens past a bleak industrial sky; the hunting party in the Allegheny Mountains, in which a crude, even revolting masculinity somehow collides with the sublime — the elegiac tale suddenly acquired a sharp political point. The film is the great cinematic poem to the world of what we have come to call, as a consequence of the current presidential campaign, “the white working class.” “The whole thing,” Christopher Walken says lovingly about his Pennsylvania town on the night before he and his friends are to deploy to Vietnam. “It’s right here.”