This book will surely be widely denounced. Its merit, which is considerable, is suggested by the vast coalition who will want to deride it: the corporate elite, Republicans, Clinton Democrats, neoliberals, the politically correct lobby, libertarians, neocons. Any author who can provoke such an array of enemies must be onto something. Walter Benn Michaels’ argument...
Wal-Mart is hated by some people for the very reasons others love it. Liberals and leftists hate it because they allege Wal-Mart’s substandard wages turn employees into helots. Libertarians and some conservatives love it because Wal-Mart, expanding like the Blob, represents no-borders planetary capitalism. Wal-Mart is McDonald’s, only supersized. Whatever one’s opinion, a recent article...
Over the past four decades, Wendell Berry has been one of the most prolific writers in America, averaging around a book each year. Much of this output has been in the realm of poetry, for which he has been honored with the T.S. Eliot Award, the Aiken Taylor Award, the John Hay Award, and other...
This summer, as the odious Barry Bonds advanced toward Henry Aaron’s home-run record, I told a friend: “I’m going to write Bonds a letter. And it’s going to be even more vitriolic than the one I wrote Aaron 30 years ago.” Just kidding, of course! When Aaron broke the most venerable record in baseball—then held,...
Keith Ellison won the nomination of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party on September 12 to represent Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, which centers on the city of Minneapolis; he seems all but certain to win the general election against the Republican nominee, Alan Fine. Ellison’s primary victory has generated tremendous national media attention, because his likely triumph in...
The pro-life principles of President Bush have often been questioned (not least in these pages), but, in late August, the President confounded his critics and firmly established his credentials as the most pro-life occupant of the Oval Office since Bill Clinton. In 1999, the Food and Drug Administration approved “Plan B,” the “morning-after pill,” for...
The GOP’s latest legislative attack on the South provides a good look at just how far the Republicans have gone on their racial and multicultural guilt trip. In July, President Bush and his Myrmidons saddled the country, in general, and Dixie, in particular, with a 25-year extension of the ill-conceived Voting Rights Act. If ever...
In his recent biography of William Jennings Bryan, A Godly Hero, Michael Kazin joins a long line of historians in making the claim that Bryan (1860-1925) was an ideological precursor of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the book’s Introduction, Kazin asserts that Bryan “did more than any other man—between the fall of Grover Cleveland and the...
World War II has been very slow to yield up its secrets. We learned easily about the heinous misdeeds perpetrated by the Axis powers upon innocent populations, but it has been harder to expose and explain the “secrets” of our conduct toward innocent civilians and ordinary soldiers who came under our control or influence. And...
June 1941 is an important and valuable book. Rather than provide the lives of Hitler and Stalin in parallel, historian John Lukacs seeks carefully to probe the dynamic of the relationship between the two men in order to illuminate a pivotal moment in world history. At this, he is brilliantly successful. Lukacs’s spare account, devoid...
Some years ago, at a seminar on Homer for mostly Greekless scholars, an eminent American conservative opined that, whatever merits there were in the civilization of ancient Greeks, no one could take their childish religion seriously. Somewhat testily, I replied that a religion that had attracted the attention of such considerable scholars as Ulrich von...
As the global-trade establishment becomes more insulated from the growing criticism of people still rooted in their native soil, it is missing the turn in world events that is frustrating its efforts. Examples abound. The latest round of trade-liberalization negotiations has never managed more than a crawl since it was launched by the World Trade...
Public and private interests are joining forces to build a massive transportation “corridor” through the middle of Texas—threatening property rights, wildlife, and the historic landscape of the Lone Star State. The Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) would be the initial U.S. portion of a complex of highways and rail lines from the interior of Mexico to the...
The United States, of all Western legal systems, is probably the harshest on manufacturers, at least insofar as they can be held liable for millions or even billions of dollars in damages for unanticipated defects in their products. Until about the middle of the 20th century, liability standards in this country were not significantly different...
Israel’s recent siege of Lebanon, which has imposed a crippling humanitarian, economic, and psychological setback on her northern neighbor, may return Syria to the center stage of Middle Eastern politics. Considering Syria’s enduring influence over Lebanon and the Palestinians and her close ties to Iran, ignoring Syria no longer serves America’s (or Israel’s) interests. Even...
When George Bernard Shaw decided to devote himself to the destruction of civilization (or, as he would have preferred to call it, the cause of socialism), he spent years studying political economy. As Chesterton put it in a book devoted to his longtime friend, Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among the...
Readers of Chronicles already know that David Middleton is an extraordinarily accomplished poet. For much of the rest of the reading world, unfortunately, he is a well-kept secret. Living in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and teaching at Nicholls State University, he is far removed from the centers of literary power and influence. Even if that were not...
Nearly every celebration of Mexican heritage by Mexicans in the United States now features references to the Aztecs and some form of traditional Aztec dance, called La Danza Azteca. This would be something like the Irish celebrating Oliver Cromwell and the Cromwellian confiscations and settlement—only worse. Few Mexicans today, on either side of the border,...
The American love of free enterprise has been one of this country’s greatest blessings. The same, however, cannot be said unequivocally of the economic individualism that we too often assume is an indispensable part of the free-enterprise system. The fundamental fallacy of that assumption should be obvious: Every economic transaction, by definition, requires more than...
A friend who has just returned from Lebanon told me that one of the jokes he heard before leaving Beirut was that the Bush administration decided to hire Hezbollah as one of the faith-based organizations that would help in the rebuilding of post-Katrina Louisiana. After all, the Lebanese Shiite group has been assiduously reconstructing the...
It is paradoxical that, having led the Western world to triumph over fascism and then communism, the United States is now the vanguard of yet another world socialist order. This American Empire, based on the benevolent neoconservative principles of borderless free enterprise, trade, and migration and consisting of multicultural social democracies enforced by U.S. military...
For the last two years, the New Democracy Party has held power in Greece, following 23 years of almost continuous rule by the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). The general impression abroad is that New Democracy is a conservative party, the Greek equivalent of the Christian Democrats in Germany or the Republican Party in the United...
PERSPECTIVE The Root of All Evilby Thomas FlemingPolicy, purpose, and pleonexia. VIEWS It’s Hard Times, Cotton Mill Girlsby Tom LandessManufacturing, gone with the wind. How Neutral Is the Fed?by Greg Kaza A measure of humility. Giving America Priority in Trade Policyby William R. HawkinsFreeing American trade. The Price of Globalismby David A. HartmanAssessing the fallout....
Historians tend to make the same argument: The South lost the Civil War because its economy was agrarian rather than industrial, with too few munitions factories to supply Confederate troops with weapons and too few textile mills to clothe them. According to these same historians, the postbellum sharecropper system proved to be an economic disaster,...
The American love of free enterprise has been one of this country’s greatest blessings. The same, however, cannot be said unequivocally of the economic individualism that we too often assume is an indispensable part of the free-enterprise system. The fundamental fallacy of that assumption should be obvious: Every economic transaction, by definition, requires more than...
Miami Vice Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Michael Mann Screenplay by Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich Miami Vice isn’t a film; it’s a cultural indicator. This thought came to me as I was making my way off a plane coming home from Las Vegas. (I was traveling for business, not pleasure, if...
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES on writ of certiorari to the court of appeals June 26, 2013 (Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court.) The jurisprudence of liberty is a bright and shining star. Its twinkling arc across the sky of our constitutional polity signals the nation’s fundamental commitment to the...
The Federal Reserve Act, passed at the close of 1913, created the current U.S. central bank in order to “establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States.” However, in response to monetary-policy errors committed by the central bank, Congress has, from time to time, amended the act. For example, during the 1970’s,...
If you did not know beforehand that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadine-jad was one of the most important men in the most neuralgic region of the world—and, by extension, in the world itself—you’d never have guessed it. One of the few things he has in common with President George W. Bush is a forgettable face. In...
The academy is in an even worse plight than you may imagine. Every so often, surveys reveal just how far America’s professors are out of touch with the political and cultural mainstream. Not only do they overwhelmingly register with the Democratic Party, but most adhere to the straitest sect within that tradition, those who regard...
While Ted Galen Carpenter makes some valid points about the situation today in Afghanistan (“America’s Other War,” News, August), his attempt to blame everything on an alleged shift of focus from Afghanistan to Iraq is nonsense. This is an old, tired charge made mainly by antiwar Democrats in the last election but abandoned when it...
I can’t forget the sorrow of my lodge brothers when the doors closed to our beloved home. We had to pay a bill for a new roof, then the ice machine in the bar went on us. When the jukebox broke, we couldn’t play “Poland Shall Not Perish While We Live to Love Her.” Neighbors around...
Sir Alfred Sherman, R.I.P. My dear friend and long-time associate Sir Alfred Sherman, who died in London on August 26, started his long political life as a Stalinist and ended it as one of the few “paleo” thinkers in today’s Britain. He will be remembered as the man who first invented “Thatcherism” and then explained...
Coincidence is the smile of luck, but it is also the laughter of misfortune. A smile is singular, rather like tears; it appears meaningful insofar as it seems to have a precipitant cause. Laughter, by contrast, is repetitive and mechanical; automatons may laugh, but they can scarcely be imagined smiling. Thus, hysterical laughter is common...
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” —Walt Kelly’s Pogo Some months before the invasion of Iraq, a well-known neocon stopped by my office to stump for war. It would all be very easy, he said coolly. We just needed to eliminate a handful of people in Saddam Hussein’s government, and all resistance...
“I owe you an apology, compadrito,” Héctor Villa was telling his friend, Jesús “Eddie” Juárez. Jesús “Eddie,” who hadn’t the foggiest idea what his friend was talking about, nodded his head and attempted a forgiving smile anyway, on the off chance it might prompt Héctor to clinch his apology by offering to buy another round....
Watching a disaster or beholding a disintegration is inherently destructive, but there is also an element of morbid fascination. Might there be, as well, a redemptive element in tracking the entropic parabola of the great fall of yet another Humpty Dumpty? The national coverage of the recent conventions of the Episcopalian Church, U.S.A., and of...
During a recent bout of infirmity, I turned for solace to the greatest storyteller of modern times, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). If this sounds like excessive praise, I ask you—no, I defy you—to name his superior, or even his nearest rival, for that title. Late in the Victorian era, Conan Doyle, a struggling physician,...
“Let us eat and make merry.” —Luke 15:23 This has been a happy time: I’ve spent all day with my family, eaten a fine meal, played with my grandchildren, been to a baptism, and I went to communion.” These were the words of my uncle—with their telling rhetorical climax—on leaving his sister’s house in Eastern...
PERSPECTIVE Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off by Thomas Fleming The right to an opinion. VIEWS Educated at Home by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. The pleasure that comes with struggle. The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion by Tom Landess Shaping society. Education to the ...
Watching a disaster or beholding a disintegration is inherently destructive, but there is also an element of morbid fascination. Might there be, as well, a redemptive element in tracking the entropic parabola of the great fall of yet another Humpty Dumpty? The national coverage of the recent conventions of the Episcopalian Church, U.S.A., and of...
Republicans, including President George W. Bush, may have some explaining to do if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act. Suppose a lot of people were counting on you to accomplish something and there were two ways—one hard and one easy—to do it. Which would you choose? If you picked the...
After describing the account of Reconstruction offered in an episode of PBS’s The American Experience (Breaking Glass, July), Philip Jenkins concludes that, “Were we to sit down amicably with the producers of American Experience, or the academic experts they consulted, I am confident we would not encounter a gaggle of hard-faced Stalinists.” His confidence is...
Eight years ago, I sat in the home of Nashville artist Jack Kershaw, drinking whiskey from a Jefferson cup and listening to the story of the burning of Columbia, South Carolina (February 17-18, 1865). Mr. Kershaw pointed to the various scenes in his terrifying painting of the fire: In the center, a drunken Yankee plays...
In the late 1960’s and early 70’s, when I was at college and graduate school, the moral and social validity of meritocracy was beginning to be challenged by the schools and in the press. Aristocracy of blood, a final casualty of World War II, was the one thing worse than aristocracy of intellect and talent. ...
Superman Returns Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by Bryan Singer Screenplay by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris The American Civil Liberties Union’s executive officers must be on vacation somewhere off the telecommunications grid. This supposition occurred to me as I watched Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns. Although the film takes off the wraps...
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. ...
“For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace,” declares the LORD, through his prophet Isaiah, “and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.” So great is God’s provision for His people that even “the Gentiles shall see...
I would like to add another fact in support of R. Cort Kirkwood’s article “The New Reality” (American Proscenium, July). From 1980 to 1986, I served in Military Sealift Command (civilian-crewed support vessels for the U.S. Navy). From January to May 1982, I was enrolled in a class to upgrade to Able-Body Seaman. One of...
I wish respectfully to raise a strong objection to Clyde Wilson’s analysis of the culture war in his July View: “The culture war is not of our choosing. We did not seek it or declare it. We really only wanted to be left alone to live by our patrimony in the normal human way.” This...