On September 14, as horrifying images broadcast from New Orleans dominated the nation’s headlines, USA Today, citing as its source Charles Currie, head of Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, reported that as many as a quarter of the Hurricane Katrina “evacuees” would fall victim to Post Traumatic-Stress Disorder (PTSD) and require long-term professional care....
In the early 1960’s, I was introduced to a fellow motorcycle rider by the name of Steve Foss. Before I could say anything, he quickly offered, “No relation to Joe Foss.” He had anticipated my question and that of nearly everyone he had met for years back. For most Americans back then, the name Foss...
The fate of the famous in this postmodern and even campy time is problematical. The multicultural agenda is not considerate of the distinguished or of distinctions, and “diversity” imposes quotas on what we may be permitted to admire, to enjoy, or even to know. What’s more, “the melting of forms” characteristic of the 20th century...
I must take strong issue with Michael McMahon’s “The Communion of Saints” (Views, September), which cast aspersions on the biographies of Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Cecelia, and Saint Barbara. Such sentiments are best reserved to the Soviet-era Krokidil. Devotion to these saints has less to do with the unlikely nature of their biographies and...
On Saturday, July 10, 2004, my cousin and I drove from Ciechocinek to Czestochowa, to attend a celebration of her grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Ciechocinek is a spa and resort town about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, Poland. Before the trip began, she had to stop by the aesthetics studio (a type of spa) she...
There was a time, not long ago, when Britons just laughed at political correctness, seeing it as a Californian cult that no one with any common sense could ever take seriously. Even now, one comes across Conservative politicians who will say that such and such a news story is evidence of “political correctness gone mad”—as...
For the first time, for nearly an hour, the sting of the death of Dr. Samuel Francis subsided. The ointment was in your October number—the “Letter From Charleston: The Flamingo Kid” (Correspondence) by Mr. jack Trotter. That essay alone is worth more than the cost of the entire issue. I realize that it should not...
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald called a press conference on October 28 to announce a five-count indictment against I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff and principal national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. Fitzgerald indicted Libby on one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and two counts of false statements, the charges...
Why did the Roman Empire in the West fall apart in the fifth century? The argument started even before Odovacar forced the German puppet Romulus Augustulus, whimpering, off the stage in 476. When, in 410, Alaric and his Visigoths sacked Rome, old-fashioned pagans immediately blamed Christianity and the neglect of the old rituals for the...
When peace came to Europe in 1815, Britain was in the unique position of possessing empire, wealth, and power, which would make possible a century of commercial and industrial growth and prosperity. There were disquieting signs, however. The capitalism that Mill and Ricardo would advance was entering a mature phase, so that the age of...
The President’s 2006 budget, called “austere” by some in the mainstream media, provides for an increase in spending for refugee resettlement by $154 million, allowing for the arrival of about 20,000 more refugees in 2006. President Bush has taken a personal interest in refugee resettlement, and the consensus among immigration restrictonists, both within and outside...
Almost 80 years ago, Julien Benda published his tirade against the intellectual corruption of his time, La Trahison des Clercs. The “scribes” in question are those who traffic in words and ideas. For generations before the 20th century, Benda wrote, members of the Western intellectual elite made sure that “humanity did evil, but honored good.”...
It has been more than four centuries since the last time that a German was elevated to the chair of Saint Peter. Pope Hadrian VI (1522-1523) was from Utrecht, a city within the Holy Roman Empire. Before his election as pope, he had been the teacher of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the principal representative of German...
In the Year of Our Lord 1878, on the sixth day of the sixth month of the year, was born to one Augustín Arango and his wife, Micaela Arambula, humble peasants on the Rancho de la Loyotada in Durango State, Republic of Mexico, a son, Doroteo, known to posterity as Francisco “Pancho” Villa: social bandit,...
Christopher Check, in his recount of a visit to Edinburgh (“An Instinctive Jacobite,” The Best Revenge, October), describes his glee at learning that the grave of John Knox is lost under a parking lot as well as his urge to urinate on the approximate site. The passage indicates that his glee and the urge are...
What are the basic tenets of modernity? What is the mind and temper of modern man? I would feel rather foolish to try to reply in a few paragraphs if I did not think that the spirit of modernity boils down eventually to only one idea that reappears constantly under an indefinite variety of guises....
George W. Bush bailed last September’s parliamentary election in Afghanistan as “a major step forward” for the country’s democratic process. When the results were published at the end of October, however, it became obvious that the Wolesi Jirga (Lower House) will be dominated by warlords, veteran jihadists, and former Taliban officials. The new legislature will...
‘Thou art beautiful above the sons of men: grace is poured abroad in thy lips.” -Psalm 44(45):3 One warm, late-summer afternoon in Eastern North Carolina, a few hundred primary-school children poured out of their classrooms and waited for their buses to take them far and wide around the county. My aunt, the principal, stood by...
Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose And the reindeer roamed where Paris roars to-night:— There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And — every—single — one—of— them — is — right! —Rudyard Kipling, “In the Neolithic Age” When I was a college student in the...
Christopher Wilson was arrested in October in Polk County, Florida, on obscenity charges. Mr. Wilson’s pornographic website contains pictures of the wives and girlfriends of his paying customers posing and engaging in sex acts, and he claims that about a third of his reported 160,000 customers are in the U.S. military. When some of those...
In the Afterword to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress, C.S. Lewis argued that Romanticism had acquired so many different meanings that it had become meaningless. “I would not now use this word . . . to describe anything,” he complained, “for I now believe it to be a word of such varying senses...
“O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth stand in awe of him.” – Psalm 96:9 The psalmists never tired of praising the beauty and majesty of the Lord’s house. Solomon was so eager to build a fitting temple that he traded a good part of Galilee to Hiram of...
In one of the most closely watched cases from the last Supreme Court term, Kelo v. New London, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 majority, ruled that the city of New London could exercise its “eminent domain” power to condemn several private residences in order to raze them as part of an effort to...
Some cult writers are admired more for what they mean than for what they accomplish. The works of the novelist, diarist, and prolific reviewer Anthony Powell (1905-2000) enjoyed only modest commercial success; Powell grouched to his British publisher in 1961, “I perfectly realise that I am not an enormous seller, but I am a seller,...
PERSPECTIVE The Beauty of Holinessby Thomas Fleming Fixing our gaze. VIEWS The Romantic Reactionby Joseph PearceTranscending the divide. The Loving Lookby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.A cure for the epicure. Conservatism as Medicineby Claude PolinNature versus the state of nature. Pugin and the Gothic Dreamby James PatrickTheology in the architecture. NEWS Did the Supreme Court Destroy Property...
Dennis Rader, the disgusting, twisted pervert who flattered himself with the moniker “BTK” (for “bind, torture, and kill”), is a living witness to the existence of the Devil. On August 18,2005, he was sentenced to 175 consecutive years in prison for ten grisly murders—the harshest sentence that Judge Gregory Waller of the Wichita district court...
A History of Violence Produced and distributed by Neil’ Line Cinema Directed bv David Cronenberg Screenplay by Josh Olson from the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke Film titles do not come more portentous than A History of Violence. Entering a Manhattan theater to view David Cronenberg’s latest cinematic lesson, I was half...
The northern industrial suburbs of Paris suffered the worst of eight consecutive nights of rioting on November 3-4. Disorder has now spread to dozens of provincial towns, including Dijon, the first city outside Ile-de-France (the metropolitan region) to be affected by unrest. Hundreds of cars, as well as schools, stores, and warehouses have been torched or...
Saturday afternoon, my sister-in-law, Carolina, called from Bogotá. She asked me how we were doing—repeatedly, the way her mother does—then she asked to speak to my wife. My wife wasn’t home, so Carolina asked me to have her call, since “we have a little problem.” Carolina sounded fine, so I didn’t understand why my wife...
Nights are pitch dark here. Looking up at a wonderfully clear sky, I think of how few places today permit stars. The sickly yellow-brown blur of cities has killed the most glorious God-given beauty of all. With the stars has gone reverence, too, and maybe at least partly as a result of the same. With...
The 75th anniversary of the publication of I’ll Take My Stand ought to cause traditionalist Southerners and other Americans to look closely not only at the current state of our society but at their own personal spheres of community, family, and church. The authors warned that the South was in danger of being snatched from...
Watching the horrible images of the recent bomb attacks in London, Americans might be forgiven for feeling a sense of alarm, especially when the terrorism was directly linked to homegrown suicide bombers. The thought of American extremists adopting similar tactics on our soil is extremely worrying, though few media outlets dared to explore the prospect...
Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s “Getting China Straight” (The American Interest, August) is, for the most part, an intelligent and thorough analysis of the looming presence of China on the world stage. Unfortunately, Dr. Trifkovic concludes with a suggestion—admittedly only one among many that he brings forward—that is fraught with peril. In his final paragraph, he writes:...
PERSPECTIVE Agrarianism From Hesiod to Bradford by Thomas Fleming Life in community. VIEWS The Old South, the New South, and the Real South by Tom Landess Taking off the Yankee spectacles. Reattacking Leviathan by Mark Royden Winchell Starving the beast. The Case for American Secession by Kirkpatrick Sale Still a good idea. The Writer as Farmer by James Everett Kibler Under Heaven. NEWS Solving U.S. Problems in ...
In April 1968, the University of Dallas Literature Department hosted an Agrarian reunion. We invited John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Donald Davidson to come together in several private sessions to discuss the history and meaning of I’ll Take My Stand. Ransom, Warren, Tate, and Lytle accepted. Davidson was too...
One can easily imagine meeting David Conway in the company of Adam Smith or David Hume—an historical conceit that would please him. A quietly spoken, formidably intelligent philosophy professor, he is a senior research fellow at Civitas, the think tank that grew out of the Institute for Economic Affairs—and a very agreeable lunch companion, as...
For some, the drafting of the Iraqi constitution has called to mind America’s founding. But whether any constitution will deliver liberty or democracy to Iraq’s people remains tragically uncertain. The failure of Washington to find WMDs in Iraq or to link Baghdad to anti-U.S. terrorism forced the Bush administration to find an alternate justification...
The United States has been heavily involved in Korean affairs since the end of World War II. Although our original goal of helping Korea regain her independence “in due course” was not supposed to entail a decades-long process, as events evolved, the United States became entangled in geopolitical obligations that have, so far, lasted for...
Consider these two premises: First, in 1865, the Confederacy is collapsing, and President Davis, concerned about the funds in the treasury, sends a young naval officer out on a wild expedition to hide the gold, to be used some day to help the South. Second, in 2005, knowledge of the whereabouts of the hidden gold...
August 29, 2005, the day when hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, may have marked the beginning of the end of the American Empire. Four years after the horrors in New York and Washington, D.C., showed the nation’s vulnerability to external attack, the Hobbesian free-for-all in New Orleans demonstrated just how fragile it is internally....
There has always been talk about secession in this country by those variously disgruntled on both the right and left, but, since the last presidential election, which revealed deep-seated divisions in American society over a variety of fundamental issues, that talk has grown exponentially. Such talk is not likely to lead to a dissolution of...
The traditional family is being attacked with an unconventional weapon: children’s story books. As books promoting a pro-homosexual ideology have slipped into public elementary-school libraries across America, unsuspecting children as young as age four have been exposed to immoral themes and content. Such was the case when the seven-year-old daughter of Michael and Tonya Hartsell...
In this factually and conceptually rich biography of French political thinker Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987), Daniel J. Mahoney has at least begun the task that he sets for himself in the Preface: performing an “act of intellectual recovery” to “rectify the unwarranted neglect of one of the most thoughtful and most humane political thinkers of...
“Learn to think imperially.” —Joseph Chamberlain Imagine that, for a few years, you had been investing the money you had saved for your daughter’s college education in one of those moderately conservative plans that provide some increase in the value of the investment without exposing it to major risks. But then your financial planner—let’s call...
Bill Clinton has summoned “his own mini-General Assembly of presidents, prime ministers, kings and other pooh-bahs” to devise plans for “addressing poverty, global warming, religious conflict and better governance.” The inaugural meeting of what the perjurer in chief modestly calls the Clinton Global Initiative has brought together 800 bigwigs who paid $15,000 each for a...
What does it mean to be an “agrarian”? In reading Southern literary journals, I get the impression that the “agrarians” were an isolated group of writers who, nostalgic for the preindustrial South, celebrated in prose and verse the bygone beauties of rustic life. In this sense, they were like the early Romantics, and their movement,...
In 1989, Russell Kirk recalled browsing through the library at Michigan State College as an “earnest sophomore” over 50 years earlier. It was there that he happened upon Donald Davidson’s The Attack on Leviathan. “It was written eloquently,” Kirk notes, “and for me it made coherent the misgivings I had felt concerning the political notions...
Despite recent improvements in the overall security situation in Colombia, the Bush administration remains worried about that country. Washington’s nightmare scenario is the emergence of a narcotrafficking state allied with extremist political elements and terrorist organizations. U.S. leaders are sufficiently concerned about that possibility that they are ready to continue America’s extensive antinarcotics aid to...
As America drifts away from orthodox religious belief, God becomes less and less personal and more and more political. The secular world surrounds and absorbs the spiritual. In the 21st century, the Lord joins political parties, circulates petitions, stumps for candidates. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, in a Chicago Sun-Times column, tells us that “[a] conservative...
In January, this column will celebrate its fifth anniversary. When Tom Fleming and I originally conceived of the idea back in 1998 (as an occasional “Letter From Rockford” to be written by various local activists), we were capitalizing on the fact that our city was considered by marketing agencies and national chains as an ideal...