The Michael Jackson trial is underway, and the media is licking its chops each day in anticipation of all of the lurid details that will continue to surface over the next several months. Jackson, who is 46, has been charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy who was, at the time of the alleged incidents, a...
Month: April 2005
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If You Can’t Beat ’Em . . .
While Rockford, as I wrote last month, is becoming increasingly Democratic, Winnebago County, in which Rockford lies, remains fairly strongly Republican. Despite the massive growth of the City of Rockford over the last two-and-a-half decades (it now pushes all the way to the Boone County border on the east and occupies over 60 square miles,...
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Life in the Iron Range
At Mineview in the Sky, a tourist attraction in Virginia, Minnesota, you can see, with binoculars that cost a quarter to operate, white smoke rising from the top of hills laden with iron ore that are still being mined, while the towns around them sit nestled in the valley below. Three decades ago, no one...
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Global Anarcho-Tyranny
The kind of regime that is being imposed on the world by what still passes for the West has two basic forms. The form preferred by the Democratic Party in the United States and by the European Union is multilateralist and therapeutic. The form favored by the people who currently control U.S. foreign policy is...
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Territorial Compromise
President George Bush has encouraged Arabs and Israelis to “lay down the past.” “Territorial compromise is essential for peace,” he said. “We seek peace, real peace. And by real peace I mean treaties.” Israelis praised President Bush for promising not to railroad them into any agreements, while the Palestinians believed he showed support for their...
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My Favorite Justice
“Every virtue is included in the idea of justice, and every just man is good.” —Theognis John Paul Stevens is the only U.S. Supreme Court justice to have graduated from the law school where I teach; Steven Breyer was one of my law-school teachers; David Souter may be the most adept at arcane constitutional-law doctrine;...
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Requiescat In Pace Domini
In any age, Samuel Francis would have been a remarkable man for the penetration of his mind, his unflinching pursuit of truth—regardless of current cant or personal consequences—and the gravity of his style. In our age, he is peerless, and his death represents an irreplaceable loss. Sam and I were friends and allies for over...
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Synthesizing Tyranny
Pace W.B. Yeats, mere anarchy is not loosed upon the world. What we enjoy in this country, and to a large extent in most other Western nations, is a bit more complicated than mere anarchy. It is, in fact, the unique achievement of the political genius of the modern era: what, in 1992, I called...
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Anarcho-Tyranny, Rockford Style
Like many idyllic towns in Middle America, Rockford is rife with political corruption, rotten with vice and immorality, and beset by criminal gangs who control an ever-growing drug industry and, in a good year, put Rockford ahead of Chicago in the number of murders per capita. Residents with long memories also remember articles in Life...
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Rome Revisited
“What is the theme of your conference?” asked a potential traveler to Rome. “How republics perish,” I replied. “Don’t you mean democracies?” he persisted, referring to the title of a good but far-from-profound book by Jean-François Revel. I congratulated him on getting the point of the title of our second Rome Convivium. After all, I...
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Poor Little Victim
An untimely cold finally gave me a chance to watch The Godfather (I and II)—30 years late, but just in time for fitting juxtapositions. I spent my down time sleeping, reading news about Mexico’s ongoing narco-cartel bloodbath, and reviewing former U.S. Amb. Jeffrey Davidow’s book, The Bear and the Porcupine. Most poignant were the similarities...
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DOMA
President Bush, in his State of the Union Address, repeated a campaign promise: “Because marriage is a sacred institution and the foundation of society, it should not be re-defined by activist judges. For the good of families, children, and society, I support a Constitutional Amendment to protect the institution of marriage.” The President must know,...
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On Saving Manufacturing
Scott P. Richert (“Bleeding Red, Feeling Blue,” The Rockford Files, January) refers to the loss of “higher-paying manufacturing positions with decent benefits” in Ohio and the Midwest generally, blaming the Bush administration and greedy multinational corporations. I am no fan of the Bush administration. However, Mr. Bush is damned if he does and damned if...
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The Real Fight Is Here at Home
On our refrigerator door, we have posted photos and stories of Marines who have lost their lives in the Iraq war. Among them are Cpl. Jason Dunham and Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin. Dunham was 22 when he dived onto a grenade to protect his buddies in K Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines. A top high-school...
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Counterrevolutionary Light
Both ISI and Christopher Olaf Blum, who edited this anthology, deserve our thanks for making available in English the six 19th-century French conservative thinkers whose writings are herein presented. Although these men—François René de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, Fredéric Le Play, Émile Keller, and René de La Tour du Pin—do not display...
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Loaded With Dynamite
According to his most fervent supporters, George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address has already taken its place among the great speeches of modern American politics. Whether history confirms that verdict remains to be seen. For the present, it is not the quality of the oratory but the implications for U.S. policy that deserve attention. On...
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Final Solution
Public education exacerbates today’s toxic youth subculture. The combined forces of advertisers, television, teen magazines, and internet spammers have lured our nation’s youth into lives of promiscuity. Government schools add incompetence and dependency to the mix—all wrapped in a façade of “learning” and “testing” packages. Government education, unfortunately, never quite met the promised ideal. Even...
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Hicks’ Town
In 1932, Marxist literary critic Granville Hicks and his wife, Dorothy, bought an eight-room farmhouse in Grafton, New York, a rural hamlet ten miles east of Troy, where Hicks taught English to the young engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For three years, they lived as summer people, aestivating intellectuals, divorced from the community. But when...
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Sunset in the Head
Proust wrote, in Time Regained, that “Style is a question not of technique, but of vision.” Technique may be said to inform and undergird the style, but the artistic vision has priority: It is the style. In Charles Edward Eaton’s recent collection, his 17th, comprising new verse (some published previously in Chronicles) and a generous...
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Art, Democracy, Empire
Their effect is especially pervasive and pernicious in respect of empires, as Clyde Wilson has cogently noted. The American empire, at the opening of the 21st century, might be offered as Exhibit A. In the political sphere, corruption is engendered by the magnitude of the stakes contended for; in the economic realm, greed is stimulated...
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Defending the Real America
It was about 1969. I had published a few small pieces in Modern Age and National Review. I remember well Sam Francis calling me out of the blue, flattering me as “the best-known conservative writer” on campus, and urging me to attend the discussion group of which he was the spearhead. I had a family,...
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Exterminate the Brutes
Hotel Rwanda Produced and distributed by United Artists Directed by Terry George Screenplay by Keir Pearson and Terry George Hotel Rwanda is a must-see for President Bush and his administration. It might make them rethink their oft-repeated assurance that democracy is an unqualified good to be encouraged among all peoples everywhere. From the day Belgium...
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Woodrow Wilson and America’s World Empire
Twenty-first century America is the creation of President Woodrow Wilson, who used the messianic ideology of American Exceptionalism (the belief that America is unique and morally superior to other countries) and the opportunity afforded by World War I to turn America into one of the first ideological empires of the 20th century. To achieve this,...
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On the Chesterton Review
The Chesterton Review continues on, after celebrating its 30th anniversary last year. Back in 1974, on the centenary of the birth of the great English writer G.K. Chesterton, a small and seemingly insignificant literary journal was launched in England in honor of his memory. At the time, it seemed that the memory was fading. England,...
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Digitize Me: Fake ID
The cultural critique of “robotization,” “automation,” “computerization,” “the cybernetic society,” “technofascism”—the takeover of human affairs by artificial intelligence—was born of artist/poet William Blake in the 18th century. On page after page of beautifully crabbed script, Blake raged against Reason: None could break the Web, no wings of fire. So twisted the cords, & so knotted...
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Polish-German Reconciliation in an Historic Town
On August 29, 2004, just before my departure from Poland, I attended an important ceremony at the small, historic town of Nieszawa, which lies near the Vistula River, about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, in the Kujawy-Pomorze (Kuyavia-Pomerania) region or Voivodeship (Wojewodztwo). It was a sunny and rather hot day. The town, which currently has...
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Going Nowhere
Agostino Carrino, a Neapolitan legal theorist now associated with the University of Naples Frederick II, has published a series of tracts (available in Italian, German, and French) aimed at the European Union and its claims to legitimacy. Particularly in his last two works, Democrazia e governo del futuro (2000) and L’Europa e il futuro delle...
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On Loving the Patria
Thomas Fleming’s “Love the One You’re With” (Perspective, January) is the kind of writing that first attracted me to Chronicles and The Rockford Institute. It is for this caliber of discussion that I return every year to the Summer School. When I read Dr. Fleming, I can be sure that English is being properly used,...