We consider today the sad case of Charlie Rangel, the beloved 20-term Congressman from New York City.
You’ve probably heard of the Great Man Theory of History. The Charlie Rangel story can be explained by the Great Guy Theory of History.
Men have a shorthand way of sorting through the torrents of human behavior. They’ll say someone is a “great guy.”
Sometimes I feel really sorry for my mate, Jon. Thirty years ago he hooked up with a Buddhist, pacifist, Leftist vegetarian. Fast forward a few decades, and he now lives with his worst nightmare: a patriotic conservative who attends church and eats burgers with gusto.
One of the great mysteries in today’s United States is how a country founded on the principle of individual freedom, having achieved great wealth and world influence, could have developed a political class bent on transforming the nation into a collective dominated by a powerful central government.
In what we tell ourselves is an age of reason, we are behaving increasingly irrationally. More and more people are signing up to weird and wacky cults, para-psychology, seances, paganism and witch- craft. There is widespread belief in ludicrous conspiracy theories, such as the 9/11 terrorist attack being an American plot…