I don’t know what happened to David Frum a couple of years ago, although I suspect that gig he had at the White House had something to do with it, but he’s become a consistently surprising commentator. I don’t remember feeling the need to attach that adjective to his prose before about 2006. Here he comes out foursquare against Churchillian prose. “As a former speechwriter myself, I am sometimes asked to review the work of aspiring young writers. In their drafts it is always 1940. Their language is grand, soaring, and – yes – Churchillian. It is always a finest hour, and they never have anything to offer except blood, toil, tears and sweat.” We’re through the looking glass when we have a leading conservative commentator making fun of the Churchillian impulse.
I don’t know what happened to David Frum a couple of years ago, although I suspect that gig he had at the White House had something to do with it, but he’s become a consistently surprising commentator. I don’t remember feeling the need to attach that adjective to his prose before about 2006. Here he comes out foursquare against Churchillian prose. “As a former speechwriter myself, I am sometimes asked to review the work of aspiring young writers. In their drafts it is always 1940. Their language is grand, soaring, and – yes – Churchillian. It is always a finest hour, and they never have anything to offer except blood, toil, tears and sweat.” We’re through the looking glass when we have a leading conservative commentator making fun of the Churchillian impulse.
It’s almost as refreshing as David’s piece a couple of months ago, arguing that Detroit’s decline has a lot to do with its inability to lead in higher education and the arts. That piece actually contains the sentence “Brawn counts for very little in the modern world,” the sort of heresy likely to get a guy stricken from the invite list to Richard Perle’s best parties. The world is full of surprises.