In the current issue of World Magazine, veteran journalist Cal Thomas talks about the scant trust in new media and some of his experiences over fifty years. Here’s one.
One of my favorite stories about what maintaining integrity and “guarding your heart” in the Christian life can mean came, surprisingly enough, from the pornographer Larry Flynt. In 2007, Flynt was offering $1 million to anyone who could “out” a member of Congress or other public figure who was a “family values conservative” in rhetoric, but something quite different in private life. One day, Flynt rolled into Fox’s green room in New York in his wheelchair (he had been shot and paralyzed by a gunman in Georgia in 1978). After exchanging perfunctory greetings, he said to me, “I thought you’d be interested in something.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“We did an investigation of you.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah,” Flynt said. “We didn’t find anything.”
I laughed. “Praise the Lord, a personal endorsement from Larry Flynt! You were just looking in the wrong place for my sins.”
Nostalgia: What do we make of the past? “A man who can reach a certain age—I cannot be precise as to what age—without experiencing nostalgia must have had a pretty wretched existence.”
Reading: Long-time editor and reviewer John Wilson offers a list of novels and books he’s looking forward to this summer, including the work of E.X. Ferrars and her Andrew Bassnet series, in which a retired botanist retires only to find he’s come across a murder.
The Soviet Man: In his book The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel “argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a ‘new Soviet person’ (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it, ‘The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born.'” What helped build this new person was a curious amalgamation: “Soviet Americanism.”
Anniversary: In Hong Kong, they will not forget what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. None of us should.
From @SJMelniszyn /Twitter
Photo: Main Street, Iowa. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.