Diana West is a conservative columnist and author known for her commentary on culture, media, and politics. She contributed cultural criticism and commentary to The Weekly Standard between 1995 and 2001, writing on topics ranging from popular entertainment to conservative ideology. She is also the author of several books examining American culture and foreign policy.
Louis Armstrong was a great trumpet player, a major jazz innovator, and a widely beloved entertainer. But was he the Second Coming? This is the hardly exaggerated implication of Ken Burns's Jazz documentary, and it's one well worth pondering -- not for what it says about the great Satchmo, but for…
On one of the last mornings of 1970, Elvis Presley arrived in Washington, D. C., to meet Richard Nixon. Or so the rock idol hoped. In a five-page letter to the president scrawled on American Airlines stationery, Presley introduced himself: "I am Elvis Presley and admire you and have great respect…
I was paranoid from that moment on," Oliver Stone tells biographer James Riordan. This should be good: What experience could possibly have prompted the onset of so fertile a paranoia?
Here's an unlikely front in the culture war: a land where divorce is unusual, lawns are meticulously tended, and children go to schools that are impervious to drugs, condoms, and multiculturalism. In this homogenous suburbia, nobody cusses and rec rooms abound. Homosexuality is non-existent, incest…