Let us now praise famous Queenslanders, in particular the most famous Queenslander of the lot: Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, who died, aged 94, on April 26. One of Australia’s most sure-footed and most intuitively brilliant political leaders, Sir Joh, as everyone called him (though he received his knighthood only in 1983, it is now impossible to...
Year: 2005
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American Historians and Their History
This article is drawn from the author’s speech on accepting The Rockford Institute’s first John Randolph Award at the historic Menger Hotel in San Antonio, a short distance from the Alamo. For this occasion, I have been asked to reflect on “the historian’s task” and “the American republican tradition.” To do so could be a...
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Shelby Foote, R.I.P.
Shelby Foote, one of the giants of Southern literature, passed away on June 27 at his home in Memphis at the age of 88. An unapologetic Mississippian, Foote never finished college but had much more valuable experiences—he grew up with another world-class Southern writer, Walker Percy, and, as a young man, played tennis on William...
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Confessions of an Autodidact
Is self-education a good idea? The greatest of my teachers, Walter Starkie, in his delightful autobiography Scholars and Gypsies, recalls a comment made in 1914 by his godfather, J.P Mahaffy, the legendary provost of Trinity College, Dublin, about W.B. Yeats: “Poor fellow! He is an autodidaktos—he never worked under a Master.” Yeats did not end...
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I’m Just a Travelin’ Man
“Education begins with life,” said Benjamin Franklin somewhere. That was how it always seemed to me when I was growing up in Southern Ireland in the 1970’s and 80’s. I enjoyed some things about school, especially my secondary school—an experimental comprehensive, one of only two in the country at that time, opened to cater to...
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The Party Pooper
Keith Sutherland is a respected British publisher of such works as History of Political Thought and Polis: The Journal of Greek Political Thought, as well as the executive editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. He has also edited such important collections of essays as The Rape of the Constitution? (2000)—of which compendium Margaret Thatcher...
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A Master of His Time
Gordon S. Wood’s Americanization of Benjamin Franklin is a welcome testimony to the renewed interest in America’s Founding Fathers. Although most Americans have a clear idea as to the importance of Washington’s military role and Jefferson’s contribution in writing the Declaration of Independence, few appreciate the pivotal part Franklin played in legitimizing the Revolution among...
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Preternatural Selection
War of the Worlds Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by David Koepp and Josh Friedman Holy oxymoron! Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a thoughtful summer blockbuster. While it serves up the obligatory thrills of the school’s-out-let-it-rip subgenre, it also pays surprisingly scrupulous homage to its...
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Judge Roberts
As the U.S. Senate prepares to consider President George W. Bush’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, there seems to be a certain ambiguity about Judge Roberts’ position on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion-on-demand the “law of the land.” On the one hand, he is on record as saying...
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You Can’t Always Get What You Want
My meeting with the college dean was a disillusioning experience. I had figured that it would take about ten minutes to fill out the required paperwork to transfer from this private college to a state university, but, when I emerged a half-hour later, I realized how naive I had been about higher education. I had...
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The Communion of Saints
Every one loved St Bridget. Even the sunbeams liked to be near her. One day an April shower came on, and, as she entered her cell, she flung her wet cloak over a sunbeam shining through the window, thinking it was a wooden beam. The bright ray willingly held up her mantle hour after hour,...
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The Autodidact at Work and Play
Every writer is an autodidact, for reasons that are fairly obvious when you think about it. First, the business of writing (as distinguished from composition) cannot be taught but must be learned by imitation and by practice. And, second, unless he is a scholar, newspaper journalist, or technical-scientific writer, a writer must discover his proper...
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Whose Security?
Several years ago, when the summer blockbuster Independence Day came out, I was told that audiences cheered the part where alien spacecraft destroyed such Washington, D.C., landmarks as the U.S. Capitol and the White House. At least some Americans know who the real enemy is and are willing to cheer publicly at cinematic depictions of...
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The Imperial Trajectory
“We oppose militarism. It means conquest abroad and intimidation and oppression at home. It means the strong arm which has ever been fatal to free institutions. It is what millions of our citizens have fled from Europe.” —Democratic National Platform, 1900 Mention militarism, and names that come to mind probably include men on horseback such...
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Outsourcing Parenthood
Two categories of parents emerged in the 1970’s: those who wanted to rear children and those who merely wanted to have them. I first became aware of the distinction in 1972, about the time the feminist revolution was beginning its blitzkrieg through university campuses. I had been married about four years, and the stark differences...
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The Republican Party’s Welfare Queens
Republicans routinely portray themselves as fiscal guardians. In truth, they, like the Democrats, are irresponsible wastrels. Outlays are up by one third under President George W. Bush, making him the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson. As the Cato Institute’s Stephen Slivinski observes, “Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still...
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Faith-Based Immigration
Attempting to make dinner conversation at a May 2004 refugee contractors’ conference, I speculated about the chances of Serbs, now hounded and persecuted in Kosovo, coming to America on the U.S. refugee program. In the last ten years, the percentage of Serbs in the Serbian province of Kosovo has declined from over ten percent to...
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A Hydra With Two Heads
On Tuesday, May 31, just two days after a decisive 55-percent majority of French voters had rejected the treaty proposal for a constitution for Europe, simultaneously destroying the president’s waning prestige and the fragile unity of France’s Socialist Party, Jacques Chirac staggered his supporters and detractors by pulling an extraordinary two-eared hybrid from his conjuror’s...
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Getting China Straight
The challenge that the rise of China presents to the United States is more pressing than any other global issue except for the ever-present threat of jihad. Beijing is rapidly becoming a regional power of the first order, the Asian hegemon that will need to be contained, confronted, or, in some way, appeased. Its ruling...
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Republicanism, Monarchy, and the Human Scale of Politics
The Founding Fathers had to face hard and unprecedented questions about the size and scale of a political order. They occupied a vast region, and conventional wisdom said that such could only be governed by monarchy. They were determined to be republicans, however, and the conventional wisdom was that republics had to be small. The...
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Please Tread on Me
“Sic Semper Tyrannis.” —from the Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia “I want everybody to hear loud and clear that I’m going to be the president of everybody.” —George W. Bush “I hope we get to the bottom of the answer. It’s what I’m interested to know.” —George W. Bush A bit of folklore, often...
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Women in Combat
Two women marines and a female Navy petty officer were killed, and eleven were wounded, when their convoy was ambushed on the night of June 23 in Fallujah. The Pentagon took several days to confirm the casualties, and media coverage was thin. If Americans took note of the tragedy at all, it was not to...
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Raisonné Dérèglement
Whether all authorities agree with what is averred here—that Ernest Hemingway was one of America’s greatest writers—is uncertain. Surely, however, his work constituted a watershed; if his chastened style and objective manner no longer seem striking, it is because subsequent American writing owes so much to him that his originality is disguised. Prima facie evidence...
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The Legacy of Sandra Dee
A first-wave Baby Boomer, I grew up the 1950’s and early 60’s. We teenage girls yearned to look like Sandra Dee (a.k.a. Alexandra Zuck), who passed away on February 20, 2005. If we couldn’t remake ourselves into the image of “Gidget,” then Mouseketeer-turned-beach-babe Annette Funicello, Carol Lynley (Blue Denim), Tuesday Weld (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!),...
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The Conservative Cosmos
There is no question that the media landscape has shifted seismically in the last two decades. In the Reagan years, I eagerly subscribed to National Review and the American Spectator; I even sent in an ad from National Review for a magazine called Chronicles of Culture. Those publications, joined by Human Events and numerous syndicated...
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Killing Off Limited Government
The federal government cannot ban criminals from bringing guns to schools, but it can arrest a person for growing marijuana at home to ease nausea from chemotherapy. Such is the state of Supreme Court jurisprudence. The intellectual case for the “War on Drugs” faded long ago. Criminalization of what is primarily a moral and health...
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Low Blows, Dark Vengeance
Cinderella Man Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Ron Howard Screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman Batman Begins Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Christopher Nolan Screenplay by David S. Goyer Boxing has always been a favorite subject for screenwriters. No other sport accommodates their mythomaniacal instincts...
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Powers, Principalities, Spiritual Forces
In Ephesians 6, the Apostle Paul writes, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12). Political scientist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul went beyond the usual interpretation of these “spiritual forces” as demons to see...
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Dia de los Muertos
Fall had always been Héctor Villa’s least-favorite season. This year, as the days shortened and his cousin’s stayover in his home lengthened inexorably, he felt his substance as a householder drain away in exact proportion to the diminishing quantity of the pale indirect light. Four days after the shortest day of the year comes Christmas;...
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On Covering Islam
As a paleoconservative and traditional Catholic, I greatly enjoy Chronicles and look forward to every issue. I am, however, increasingly disturbed by the consistent and growing demonization of Muslims in the magazine. I think it is quite reasonable to accept that Islam has some extremely rough edges. It has bloody borders, most terrorists are Muslims,...
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Raiching the Constitution Over the Coals
The Supreme Court is often described as the final redoubt of states’ rights. In the last decade, we have heard much about the Court’s “New Federalism” jurisprudence. The Court, we have been warned, is seeking to return the Constitution to the horse-and-buggy days of yesteryear. Legal oracles such as the New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse...
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Downing Street Memo
The Downing Street Memo, a British-government document on Iraq leaked in May to the Sunday Times, may be as close as the American public will get to a “smoking gun” implicating the Bush White House in manipulating this country into war. A July 23, 2002, memo (actually, the minutes of a British cabinet meeting) written...
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The Republic We Betrayed
A republican government is an exercise in human optimism, and patriotic republicans must engage in an unremitting struggle against that human entropy we used to know as Original Sin. Any American citizen today can quote, or at least dimly recall, Washington’s declarative challenge in his Farewell Address: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead...
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Guantanamo Bay
Guantanamo Bay is the subject of continuous debate. Can the United States detain indefinitely members of the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, or Al Qaeda insurgents captured in Iraq, at our military base in Cuba? What sort of interrogation measures are permissible by international law in order to obtain information to protect Americans from the continuing...
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Iraq: The Way Out
Two years and three months after President Bush announced the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq, the war is far from over. Large areas of the country are affected by an open-ended guerrilla insurgency. Periods of intense violence are followed by brief and temporary lulls. Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on May 31 that...
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Things That Go Bump in the Night
“We are born with the dead / See, they return and bring us with them.” —T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” “The philosophical and ideological currents of a period necessarily affecting its imaginative literature,” wrote Russell Kirk in “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale,” the supernatural in fiction has seemed ridiculous to most, nearly all this...
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The Wrong War
I am nervous about the course I am teaching, this coming fall, about World War II. As I will explain to the class from the outset, there are a few things I do not know about the topic—namely, when the war began, when it ended, where it happened, who were the key protagonists on each...
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Shoddy Goods, Shoddy Selves
Victor Navasky’s memoirs, which discuss his longtime relation to the Nation and how he came to publish that magazine, create for the reader two misleading impressions before he gets beyond the dust cover. Contrary to the blurbs of Bill Moyers, Barbara Ehrenreich, E.L. Doctorow, and Kirkus Reviews, this book is neither “elegant” nor “subversive” nor...
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Regime Change
Whenever Washington targets some poor, misbegotten country for “regime change,” references to that unfortunate nation’s media by Western journalists are usually preceded by the modifier state-owned or state-controlled. The inference is clear: These guys are shills, not real journalists. Yet the West has its own state-owned and controlled media: The Brits have the BBC, and...
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Twentieth Century Fox
If, indeed, the second half of the 20th century was, in our country, “the age of Nixon,” as Robert Dole declared in his eulogy for the man at Yorba Linda in 1994, then Mark Feeney has undertaken to demonstrate just how that age fits into the larger category of the 20th century itself as “the...
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We the Subjects—August 2005
PERSPECTIVE The Republic We Betrayedby Thomas Fleming Enslaving ourselves. VIEWS Republicanism, Monarchy, and the Human Scale of Politicsby Donald W. LivingstonOur kingless monarchy. Powers, Principalities, Spiritual Forcesby Harold O.J. BrownCharging toward the Dies Irae. Please Tread on Meby Clyde WilsonThus always to presidents. NEWS The Republican Party’s Welfare Queensby Doug BandowMay a thousand Enrons bloom....
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Effeminate Gospel, Effeminate Christians
Every definition of masculinity into which our Lord Jesus Christ does not fit belongs in the rubbish heap. Indeed, there could be no greater example of a man than He. Contrary to modern portrayals, Jesus was neither a sensitive metrosexual nor a macho-macho man. The tenderness that He displayed toward those whom He loved (including...
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A Dirge Transposed
“A novel,” wrote Stendhal, “is a mirror carried along a road.” In Cyn-thia Shearer’s new book, the road, literally speaking, is that between the invented town of Madagascar, Mississippi, where the action is centered, and Memphis, the other major setting; metaphorically, it is the distance the South has traveled from about 1950 to the early 21st...
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Effeminate Gospel, Effeminate Christians
Every definition of masculinity into which our Lord Jesus Christ does not fit belongs in the rubbish heap. Indeed, there could be no greater example of a man than He. Contrary to modern portrayals, Jesus was neither a sensitive metrosexual nor a macho-macho man. The tenderness that He displayed toward those whom He loved (including...
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Guys of the Golden West
During the first half of the second-to-last decade of the 19th century, three young gentlemen traveled from their native region of the northeastern United States to the trans-Mississippi West, still a few years short in those days of the official closing of the American frontier. Though alike in being Ivy Leaguers, well-born, well-bred, and well-heeled,...
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On Millennial Misrepresentations
Once again, Church historian Aaron D. Wolf slanders evangelicals with his essay “The Christian Zionist Threat to Peace” (Views, May). Using the classic ploy of quoting from a dictionary-type source in his introduction allows him to set up his own dispensationalist straw man to knock down in the rest of his polemic. Mr. Wolf does...
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Heroes in the Age of the Antihero
We Americans are in a serious quandary. Our national mythology—like the mythologies of most nations—requires us to pay tribute to the heroes of the past. Once upon a time, Fourth of July speeches routinely invoked the bravery of George Washington and his men, their sufferings at Valley Forge, and their surprise crossing of the Delaware. ...
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GOP Nuclear Plan
Some republicans object to using the term nuclear option to describe their plan to end filibusters on the Senate floor during confirmation hearings, but the image of total war is a fitting one for the possible direction of the “upper chamber” these days. The 11th-hour compromise between the squishes in both parties will only serve...
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A Place to Stand
The names are legendary; the tales of heroism, a part of our heritage as Texans and Americans. Houston, Crockett, Bowie, Travis: All, save William Barret Travis, were nationally known figures before they came to Texas, which was then considered Mexican territory. Sam Houston had been governor of Tennessee, a protégé of Andrew Jackson, a war...
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Men of the West—July 2005
PERSPECTIVE Heroes in the Age of the Antiheroby Thomas Fleming Unbreaking glass. VIEWS Guys of the Golden Westby Chilton Williamson, Jr.A glorious sunset. A Place to Standby Wayne AllensworthTexas and the making of men and heroes. Cowboy Heroesby Roger D. McGrathLearning the Code of the West. Effeminate Gospel, Effeminate Christiansby Aaron D. WolfFrom authority to...