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...
Year: 2005
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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,...
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From Mercy Killing to Euthanasia
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...
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Has America Lost Her Moral Gag Reflex?
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...
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The Villas of New Mexico
“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...
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Themselves Alone
“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...
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Free to Leave
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...
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Music, Technology, and Psychological Warfare
“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...
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Of Masons, Magic, Monks, Medicine, and Marriage
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...
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Fly Boy
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...
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No Graven Images
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...
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Political Romanticism, Utopian Violence
“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...
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Innocent Leftists
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...
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Beautiful Terror
“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...
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Susan Sontag, R.I.P.
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...
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The Yoke of Democracy
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...
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Man and Everyman
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...
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And Death Shall Have No Dominion
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...
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Playing Poetry With a Net
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...
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Everybody Hans Küng Tonight!
“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...
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The Abolition of Learning
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...
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Room to Pass
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...
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Endorsing Torture
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...
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A Hero Among Heroes
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...
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Perfect for This Moment
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...
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Foreign Policy “Revolutionary”?
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...
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Three Strikes and You’re Out
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...
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A Glimmer of Hope in the Holy Land
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...
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Dealing With a Nuclear Iran
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...
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Human, Not-Quite Human
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...
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Tsunami on St. Stephen’s Day
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...
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On Reforming Education
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...
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On Ending “Gay Marriage”
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...
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The Abolition of Man—March 2005
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....
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Night Vision
“I hear thunder,” Ivalene said in a puzzled voice, looking up to the blue sky stretched tight across the great canyon. “How could there be thunder?” Will Ford demanded. “There isn’t a cloud in sight. They must be blasting somewhere close by to here.” “So how could they be blasting, smart-ass?” she retorted. “Blasting isn’t...
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The Genuine Article
Some of the happiest memories of my collegiate days are fervent barroom debates among a small but redoubtable and congenial company of reactionaries. The smell of spilled beer and sawdust still reminds me of those times. Outside, the 60’s raged. Hairy “students” with girlish arms and shoulders and trust funds preached revolution and the merits...
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Diagnosing the Diminishing Dollar
Holding a green piece of paper decorated with patriotic symbols as a proxy for economic value is an act of faith. To do so with the currency of your own country is a necessary act of faith, since daily life requires it in order to make economic transactions. But to hold sizable amounts of the...
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The Bush Economic Agenda
Energized by his election as if it were a landslide, President George W. Bush proposes to spend his “political capital” on an ambitious economic agenda headed by reform of Social Security and the U.S. Tax Code. The President’s candor in acknowledging that the deficits and tax cuts of his first term—the “Wall Street Relief and...
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Postwar Immigration
The British National Party (BNP), founded in 1982 by John Tyndall, a former chairman of the National Front, has consistently campaigned to reverse postwar immigration, to withdraw Britain from the European Union, to reintroduce the death penalty for serious crimes, to back Ulster’s Loyalists, to support the family, and to place greater restraints on big...
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Puritan Pervert
Kinsey Produced by American Zoetrope Written and directed by Bill Condon Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Pervert. Although the word has been drummed out of polite conversation in recent years, pervert comes inevitably to mind when discussing Alfred C. Kinsey, the sex statistician and subject of Bill Condon’s new film, Kinsey. Pervert perfectly applies to...
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Is There a Khilafah in Your Future?
Discussions of jihad terrorism and the best defense against it rarely avoid entanglement in the contentious question of the relationship of terrorist actions to Islam as a religion. Is the terrorism an aberration of Islam, or is it, judged in light of history, the prevailing orthodoxy? Indeed, the question is an important one, and, in...
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What’s Right With the World
The Conservative Bookshelf has so much going for it that I am hard pressed to nominate its best quality, though I aim to do so. Let me indicate something about the salient qualities of Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s latest production, before I identify what I see as his trump card. In the first place, these 50...
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Saints and Pilgrims
Marie’s walk was an act of prayer for her brother, who had leukemia. Alessandro had recently endured a divorce and was walking to find peace. Klaus was taking time out to decide what to do with his life after losing his job. Sharon and Chris were on the Spanish leg of a three-month tour of...
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Cataloguing What’s Been Lost
Chilton Williamson’s study of the sources of American conservative thought presupposes certain assumptions about his subject that may not be universally shared but are defensible nonetheless. Williamson suggests that American conservatism is essentially paleoconservative, and both his choice of current conservative authors and his comments on Joe Scotchie’s Revolt From the Heartland underline this association. ...
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The Peculiar Path
A Bavarian legal scholar who has been attached to the U.N. Secretariat and to the E.U. Commission in Brussels, Josef Schüsslburner has disagreements with the German Basic Law, enacted in 1949 as an interim constitution for the West German Federal Republic. The author describes this guiding document and the circumstances that helped shape it as...
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Lebanese Rules
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...
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The Saudi Presence in the United States
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...
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Celtic Thunder
“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...
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Paleos in Context
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,...
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Toward a Hard Right
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...