“Lewis and Clark didn’t return from their trip and say, ‘Well, we didn’t find the Northwest Passage, but we did find ourselves.’ But that is the spirit of Bobo travel. Our travel dollars are investments in our own human capital. We don’t just want to see famous sights; we want to pierce into other cultures. …
Play Skillfully
“This may seem like a commonsense observation, but relativism in aesthetics is constantly trying to undermine the obvious. When the Bible tells us we are to ‘sing to Him a new song; play skillfully with a shout of joy’ (Ps. 33:3), this means there is such a thing as musical skill. The Lord has not …
Ah, Texture
“But to demonstrate their superiority to such people, the educated elites prefer to build environments full of natural irregularities. For the Bobos, roughness connotes authenticity and virtue. So the educated elites love texture . . . Really rich Bobos will hire squads of workmen with ball-peen hammers to pound some rustic wear into their broad …
Vouchers and Neutrality
“So we either have to grant that we may be taxed so that a Buddhist parent may be funded to instruct his kids that Buddhism is true, or we must say that Buddhist education and Christian education are the same for most of the day. Support for vouchers among Christians reveals that we have not …
Simple Rhythms of Life
“The educated class has conquered all and hegemonized its Bobo culture over affluent regions from coast to coast. Now the Babbitt lion can mingle with the beatnik lamb at a Pottery Barn, a Smith & Hawken, a Museum Shop, a Restoration Hardware, a Nature Company, a Starbucks, or any of the other zeitgeist-heavy institutions that …
Food Stamps for Conservatives
“Third, vouchers expose the essential hypocrisy of many of our attitudes on public policy. Educational vouchers are nothing but food stamps for conservatives. It is remarkable how often we do not see the principle involved. We simply react to some ‘wasteful’ program, defining wasteful as ‘someone else getting the money.’ Until we learn to fight …
Culture Pouts
“Avant-gardism, money, status, Le Chic, and even the 1960s idea of sexiness – it all buzzed around Pop Art. The place, without any question, was Leo Castelli’s gallery at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street. Castelli had Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, most of the heavies. It was there that the Culture buds now hung …
Vouchers and State-Sponsored Theft
[Speaking of school vouchers] “This essay is not calling for tax revolt — a refusal to pay taxes because I am being stolen from. Rather, the point is that we should stop clamoring for yet another program that would require the government to steal still more. The reason we are stolen from is that we …
Bohemian Lockstep
“It was all sheer rhetoric, of course, the antibourgeois sing-along of bohemia, standard since the 1840s, as natural as breathing by now and quite marvelously devoid of any rational content . . .” [Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York, Bantam Books, 1975), p. 48.]
Or Eminent Domain Maybe
“The Bible teaches that the civil magistrate may require a certain level of taxation (Rom. 13:6-7) and that Christians are required to pay those taxes cheerfully. But the Bible also teaches that civil authorities are capable of breaking God’s law, including His prohibition of stealing. Even if Ahab had had his wits about him and …