“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;...
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...
“This book tells a story about the twentieth century, which has in it a lesson for the twenty-first—one that I would think unlikely to be learned, since it is a moral lesson, concerning the role of virtue in human existence, and we know about moral lessons.” Thus begins William Pfaff’s incisive and bracing study of...
A recent film festival sponsored by Human Rights Watch at New York’s Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center attracted the hard-core sandalistas of the Upper West Side, who filed in to watch—what else?—the Sandinistas and Contras in a cartoon of a Canadian documentary called The World Stopped Watching. The accompanying flyer asked, “What happens to...
“Fame is a calamity.” —Turkish Proverb The face is familiar, but not the gray hair. To some few, it may be so from Our Gang shorts from the late 30’s and early 40’s, known by the moniker of Mickey Gubitosi. To others, it is the face of Bobby Blake of “Red Ryder” westerns and Humoresque...
Susan Sontag passed away in New York City on the Feast of the Holy Innocents at the age of 71. Dying of leukemia after a long struggle with cancer, Sontag leaves behind no image of suffering or weakness but rather one of strength and courage, idiosyncratic integrity and productivity, and a remarkably wide range of...
In a strange way, it appears that Adolf Hitler is still ruling Germany. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the forces of “democracy,” in the form of political parties, make political decisions by implementing the opposite of what they assume Hitler would have wanted. Those political parties, the governing opposition, are “democratic” because American military...
The Aviator Produced by Warner Bros. and Miramax Films Directed by Martin Scorsese Screenplay by John Logan Distributed by Warner Bros. From the late 1920’s to the late 1950’s, Howard Hughes seemed to own the world. Backed by the wealth of his father’s patented oil-drill business, he moved from Houston to Los Angeles in 1925...
My maternal grandfather was a very practical man, an entrepreneur with a self-made fortune, a local mayor, philo-Dixiecrat, devoted to his wife and three daughters. His habitual reading was the Raleigh paper and the local small-town daily (which, by some miracle, still exists). He died when I was very small, and so I never had...
“No change can be made in styles of music without affecting the most important conventions of society. So Damon declares and I agree.” —Plato, Republic The late Sam Shapiro used to tell a story about two Englishmen in China who wanted to demonstrate the superiority of their culture to one of the mandarins they had...
The Iraqis have voted. Now, it is time to start bringing home America’s troops. More than 1,400 Americans had died, and nearly 11,000 had been wounded, by the end of January. The war has already cost $200 billion, and the President is asking for another $80 billion. Yet President George W. Bush refuses to set...
“Our sympathy,” said Gibbon with his usual acuity, “is cold to the relation of distant misery.” You do not need to know very much about human nature to agree with the great historiographer that it is often very difficult, or even impossible, to sympathize with the woes of strangers. And if it is difficult to...
“Hey, compadrito—bring the mail along with you when you come inside!” Héctor Villa shouted through the open window to Jesús Juárez, his friend, who was just letting himself into the yard by the front gate where the mailbox, painted red-white-and-blue, stood on a barbershop post. Héctor “Pancho” Villa was having a pleasant Saturday morning in...
Since 1935, a branch of psychiatry specializing in hereditary illnesses and abnormalities known as “behavioral eugenics” has been warning of rampant mental illness. Dr. Franz J. Kallmann, who came to America in the mid-1930’s after having served under Ernst Rüdin, head of Hitler’s “racial hygiene” program, argued in favor of “psychiatric genetics” even after he...
In late 2000, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia. Under the law, passed by the lower house of the Dutch Parliament 104-40, a child as young as 12 can request to be put to death, provided he has at least one parent’s consent. In 1999 alone, according to the Associated Press (July...
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image . . . Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them . . . —Exodus 20:4,5 In the fourth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, Satan tempts Jesus with the offer of “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.” This...
The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis’s masterful critique of the relativism that was as rampant in his day as it is in ours, represented the culmination of the author’s quest for the quintessential meaning of man’s being and purpose. Always a diligent searcher after truth, Lewis had climbed a long and arduous path from the...
Pundits have been calling them “designer babies” since the first egg was fertilized and nurtured ex utero more than a quarter-century ago. Little Louise Brown was her parents’ biological child, however, who happened to begin life in a test tube for medical reasons: Her mother’s Fallopian tubes were blocked. Pioneering British physicians used laparoscopy to...
In the Introduction to his classic anthology of Fugitive verse, William Pratt writes: “Modern American poetry abounds in individualism, but two groups of poets have affected its course profoundly.” He is referring, of course, to the Imagists and the Fugitives. Nearly a century after the Imagists first gathered in London in 1909, I wonder what...
Few people read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) much anymore. Lines from his poems were once on the tips of tongues the world over. Students used to memorize “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” and lines from “Evan-geline” and “Hiawatha.” Longfellow’s once-great literary reputation rivaled that of Tennyson and Dickens, and, after his death, the American...
PERSPECTIVE Human, Not-Quite Humanby Thomas Fleming Abolishing God. VIEWS The Abolition of Learningby Michael McMahonSchools in the rubbish heap. Music, Technology, and Psychological Warfareby E. Michael JonesFrom Muzak to MTV. Man and Everymanby Joseph PearceAssembling the fragments. No Graven Imagesby Harold O.J. BrownServing capitalism. NEWS Dealing With a Nuclear Iranby Ted Galen CarpenterAcceptance and deterrence....
Did I read aright the piece on “Gay Marriage” by Prof. William J. Quirk (“What’s Next for the Imperial Judiciary?” News, January)? When he puts forth his solution, it turns out to be the passage of a bill that will give the “last word” to “[e]ach state’s high court.” But as he himself points out...
Michael McMahon’s otherwise insightful article on the sad state of the public schools in England (“Education and Authority,” Views, January) is marred by a wrongheaded conclusion. Mr. McMahon avers that the decline in the quality of education in England is the result of education having become a commodity. In his final paragraph, he laments that...
The tsunami that struck Asia and Africa on St. Stephen’s Day wreaked a considerable amount of havoc, but no one knows, even approximately, how many people actually died. In the first few weeks, it looked as if the grisly total would add up to about 150,000 victims, but, as politicians in Indonesia began to see...
The doping scandals that plague professional and “amateur” sports have done little to shake the enthusiasm of fans and sportswriters for their heroes. Fans still flock to the stadiums and spend their weekends watching NBA basketball games, NASCAR races, and even (if ABC is to be believed) AFL football exhibitions. As a child, I once...
Iran’s agreement to “suspend” her nuclear program in exchange for economic benefits from the European Union has dampened that crisis for the moment. The Bush administration’s vocal skepticism about the agreement, however, suggests that the crisis has not been defused. Moreover, Iran emphasizes that her nuclear activities have only been suspended, not abolished. That is...
Mahmoud Abbas’s convincing victory in the Palestinian presidential election on January 9 provided a piece of good news in an otherwise somber Middle Eastern landscape. Often described as an old Fatah apparatchik with little charisma and popularity, Abbas managed to win 62 percent of the 775,000 votes cast in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and...
April 2005 will mark the third mayoral election since I arrived in Rockford at the end of 1995. In that first election in April 1997, Rockford’s first (and, so far, only) black mayor, Democrat Charles Box, was running for his third term. For eight years, the city had been under a federal court order to...
“If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?” This old bit of black humor popped into my mind as I drove home from a local college after attending a lecture, entitled “My Long Road to a Global Ethic,” delivered by dissident Catholic theologian Hans Küng. “It would simply be too coincidental,” I thought...
In 1997, the headmaster of the English secondary school in which I was teaching ordered a bibliocaust. The inspectors were coming, and he wanted our library to look up-to-date. All the old stuff had to go; only bright, modern volumes relevant to the contemporary curriculum were to be on the shelves. Each department was told...
Alberto Gonzales’s nomination as attorney general by President George W. Bush makes official what has long been hidden and/or denied: The United States, contrary to her public professions and signed treaties, endorses and uses torture. At one point during Gonzales’s January 6 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy asked about recently...
Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists of academe have worked assiduously to destroy American heroes or simply to omit them from textbooks—and they have been largely successful. As we approach the 60th anniversary of VE Day and VJ Day and the youngest of the World War II veterans are entering their 80’s, it...
The hero of the hour, if not the messiah of the New Age, is Barack Obama, a gentleman whose name might lead you to suspect him of being an Afghan terrorist or the most recent American puppet candidate for the presidency of Iraq but who, in fact, is merely the freshman senator from the state...
If President Bush achieved nothing else in his Inaugural Address, he at least provided fodder for media pundits to chew on for a solid week or more. This is an unusual accomplishment, even for inaugural addresses, most of which are endured and then ignored by those whose job it is to listen to them and...
As dusk approached, we were offered a final meal of flat bread, roast chicken, and tomatoes. The maniacal little leader came to watch us eat, all the while aiming his gun at us. “Eat, eat. Why do you have no appetite? Are you afraid, American pig?” he said and then laughed at his own joke. ...
From oracles to astrology to double predestination, men throughout history have sought hope in a glimpse of their future. As the Greeks well understood, however, foreknowledge is usually at the root of tragedy, and even Saint Augustine warned against consulting astrologers not because astrology is mere superstition but because of the possibility that the astrologers’...
What is the meaning of the election of 2004 for the American Hard Right? The question, of course, presupposes that there is such a thing as a “Hard Right” distinct from the Mossad’s Station Pentagon, or the “moral values” evangelicals, or the Girly Boys’ Jamboree. By “Hard Right,” in this context, I mean neither what...
The significance of Chilton Williamson’s new book, The Conservative Bookshelf, is that it is the first general account of the conservative tradition to place what is now called paleoconservatism in the context of that tradition. Once upon a time, the connection would have been obvious because all conservatives were paleoconservatives, or close to it. Today,...
“The Celts fear neither earthquakes nor the waves.” —Aristotle Nearly six years ago, Chronicles published “Death Before Dishonor,” an article I wrote about the westward march of the American pioneer. Much of the time, I was writing about the Scotch-Irish—or Scots-Irish, if you prefer. These hard-edged folks were in the vanguard of the movement across...
For all the investment the United States has made in prosecuting the “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Saudi presence in the United States has gone largely unnoticed—although it may be the most lethal terror front of all. U.S. politicians have been intoxicated by Saudi petrodollars for decades. Saudi greenbacks led Spiro Agnew...
Between 1975 and 1991, Lebanon suffered a bloody civil war that had massive repercussions regionally and globally. Among other things, the hostage crisis in the 1980’s detonated the Iran-Contra crisis that almost destroyed the Reagan presidency. Today, Lebanon is relatively peaceful, though under a repressive Syrian hegemony, and the whole story may seem of little...
After September 11, the word blowback was frequently heard. It is a CIA term describing operations that come back to haunt the agency (e.g., Afghanistan). Unlimited immigration has its own form of blowback: people like Chai Vang, who, on the afternoon of November 21, 2004, shot eight deer hunters in the northwoods of the Indianhead...
Having provided advice to a number of influential Balkan figures in my time, I know the sense of frustration when sound counsel is overruled in favor of proposals based on error or mendacity. I have been proved right, but only when it was too late: Crown Prince Alexander Kara-djordjevic would have been better off had...
Stem cells have taken center stage in California. In November 2004, California’s voters approved, with 59 percent of the vote, a measure that would spend three billion dollars in borrowed state funds to pay for research that requires the destruction of human embryos. You might expect a heated debate over whether such research is morally...
The Bush administration and its supporters are investing tremendous hope in Iraq’s January national elections. According to the conventional wisdom in Washington, violence may increase as the balloting approaches, but, once the election is held, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis will be convinced that the resulting government is legitimate. Except for the foreign terrorists and...
The “War on Terror,” as the years roll by, looks more like a Maginot Line than like a Blitzkrieg. Instead of hunting down terrorists or expelling Islamic cells from the United States, President Bush has chosen to attack the rogue states of Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of targeting Islam itself as the source of anti-American...
Chilton Williamson has taken an important step toward giving postmodern conservatism a set of respectable literary credentials. If readers are expecting a conventional walk through the conservative “classics” or a set of reflections on the writers celebrated by Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind, they will be disappointed. Rather than taking tea with Dr. Johnson...
Alberto Gonzales, President Bush’s nominee to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general, is, by all accounts, a skilled lawyer who has achieved a great deal since his humble beginnings as the son of Mexican migrant farmworkers. He also has compiled a track record that should trouble all those who wish to limit abortion, immigration, affirmative...
U.S. officialdom calls them “Special Interest Aliens,” as much because they might have a special interest in us as we in them. They are aliens from countries that are considered potential sources of terrorist attacks on the American homeland, and their numbers are reportedly growing. “People are coming here with bad intentions,” an anonymous Border...
In his article “Out on a Limb: America’s Pledge to Defend Taiwan” (Vital Signs, December), Ted Galen Carpenter does not discuss whether it is in America’s national interest for Taiwan to fall under the control of the Beijing regime. Instead, he argues that our Asian allies may not support our defense of the island. To...