The New Criterion
It operates as a refuge for a civilizing element in short supply in contemporary America: honest criticism
- The Wall Street Journal
FeaturesJanuary 2010 Live free or die by Mark Steyn On the loss of liberty in the West (from "The New Statism"). Almost everyone who’s been in a movie theater over the last half-century is familiar with the great iconic image that closes the film Planet of the Apes: a loinclothed Charlton Heston falling to his knees as he comes face to face with a shattered Statue of Liberty poking out of the sand and realizes that the “planet of the apes” is, in fact, his own—or it was. In fact the shattering of Lady Liberty recurs throughout popular culture, as the most easily recognizable shorthand for civilizational ruin: most recently, in the eco-apocalyptic film The Day After Tomorrow, the Statue of Liberty gets flash-frozen in ice after sudden catastrophic climate change apparently brought on (warning: plot spoiler) by a speech from Dick Cheney. But you can go back beyond that to an 1887 edition of Life and a story called “The Next Morning,” which was illustrated by a pen-and-ink drawing of a headless Statue of Libert ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 28 January 2010, on page 10 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Live-free-or-die-4357
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
Christopher, for better & for worse On the critic, polemicist & raconteur Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011).
Webcasts
Anthony Daniels on the Euro Crisis
Andrew C. McCarthy: The Muslim Threat
Roger Kimball: The Grim Future of Statism Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must have an account to post a comment. {register now}