My weekly column at Taki's Magazine is up. Once per quarter the TakiMag suits let me post a potpourri of short random reflections. That's what this week's column is: my Quarterly Potpourri.

In among those reflections is a sort-of movie review.

My lady is still, after 29 years in the U.S.A., filling out her knowledge of the national culture. Old movies, for example: She adds them to our Netflix list based on how many awards or recommendations they got. This gives me a chance to revisit random famous old flicks.

Last week our selection was Easy Rider, which I hadn’t seen since 1969. What a period piece! I’d forgotten how obnoxiously daft the 1960s counterculture was. Watching Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper act out their rebellion against bourgeois conformity, I wanted to put on a suit and tie, light up a Chesterfield, and mix myself a martini.

Peter Fonda plays his role practically comatose. This was apparently intended to signify some kind of spiritual depth. Hippie nature-worship is right up front, dramatic mountain, river, and forest landscapes alternated with ugly strip mines and factories. The dialog is inane.

Also up front is the demonization of Southern white men. They were the enemy: leering, jeering, ugly, violent, and short-haired. To the sensitive, nature-worshipping metropolitan hippies, these were the Other, hated and feared.

The badwhites who populate the imagination of today's liberals are in direct line of descent from those Southern meanies of Easy Rider and related 1960s cultural products. And the Cold Civil War grinds on.

(Incidentally, there's a bad link elsewhere in that TakiMag piece; I'm sorry. For the Qing Ming festival, see here.)