So, was the man whose name has become synonymous with political manipulation and ends = means duplicity merely a satirist? Was Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince intended to be read for giggles rather than for counsel?

Peter Constantine, winner of the PEN Translation Prize and a National Translation Award, has just published a new translation of The Prince, and it’s winning raves for how elegantly it has captured the “pith of Machiavelli’s brilliant Italian prose.”

Now, imagine picking up any number of classics you’ve read before and reading them again with the idea that they were really intended as lampoons. Select a few titles at random—say, Crime and Punishment, The Scarlet Letter, The Magic Mountain and Oliver Twist—and now read them again, but this time as if the authors had intended to elicit guffaws, or at least wry smiles, not only at the dysfunctions of their respective societies, but also at the plights of their characters.

For some authors it would be a natural—think Kafka. For some titles, it would definitely make for some entertaining text—think Atlas Shrugged played as farce. (I’m rather keen on The Fountainhead, however, even if Roarke/Wright’s aesthetic is that of the average airport’s baggage-claim area.)

I see a whole new set of Cliffs Notes written for a whole new generation of ironists . . .

Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute says that the best way to fight is to strengthen two-parent families, not pouring more money into government programs:

Yet both candidates are largely missing the point. While they insist that strengthening labor unions or protecting homeowners from foreclosures will alleviate the hardships of the poor, the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census remind us that the breakdown of the traditional two-parent, married family is a far greater contributor to poverty in America than many of the supposed shortcomings of our economy. It’s hard to imagine that America will make much more headway on reducing persistent poverty until it halts this long-term trend.

The Census Bureau’s study on the living arrangements of American children appeared in mid-February. The data show that the number of children now living in two-parent families has dipped just below the 70 percent mark for the first time since the Census began collecting data on family formation nearly 130 years ago. After peaking in the 1950s—when about 87 percent of all children lived with two parents—the traditional family went through a rapid decline beginning in the 1970s and has continued to shrink over the last three decades, though the rate of decline has slowed somewhat. As part of this sweeping change, the percentage of children living with married parents has fallen more rapidly, down more than two full percentage points, to 66.6 percent of all kids, in the last 10 years alone. Consistent with these decreases has been a sharp rise in the number of children living with single parents and with unmarried parents.

The economic impact of this breakdown has been profound. Researchers estimate that the entire rise in poverty in America since the late 1970s can be attributed to “changes in family formation,” a euphemism for the decline of families headed by two married parents. The latest Census data illustrate the problem. Only one out of ten American kids living in two-married-parent families is in poverty—and about one-third of these families are recent immigrants whose poverty is temporary. By contrast, 37 percent of children living with single mothers are impoverished.

Full article here, via Real Clear Politics

Last September, I published on our homepage an article entitled “Do You Want to Know a Secret?”—my response to the depressing news of the phenomenal success that is that exercise in New Age dimwittery The Secret.

Seeking to profit from the general public’s inability to distinguish true religion from gimme-gimme hokum, I invented my own magical mystery con, entitled The 7 Laws of the Key.

Would you believe that, since the publication of my article, at least two books have come out referencing the power that is “The Key”?!

Am I credited anywhere with inspiring this glut of flapdoodle? Forget it. If you’re going to lead the gullible masses away from the narrow gate that leads to life down the broad road that leads to the unquenchable flames of hellfire, where the worm never dies and there’s nothing but reruns of Scrubs 24/7—at least do so honestly. But to plagiarize! If I had a lawyer, I’d sue! Why, if I had a lawyer, I’d probably be making enough money that I wouldn’t have to sue—I could just go home about now and take a nap.

Instead I see that the Oracle that is Oprah has succeeded in selling the public on another bit of faux-spiritual malarkey entitled A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, written by the same man who brought you The Power of Now (a sequel, I believe, to Zen and the Power of Then).

“Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness?” Tolle asks in A New Earth, with all the wide-eyed wonder that it is possible to muster while contemplating the redwood trim on a new Bentley.

O what I wouldn’t give to break through with a 336-page paean to self-aggrandizement of my own! O the joys of soft-soaping the soap-opera crowd with the promise of dreams manifested and a cholesterol level in the 180s!