President Bush, in the words of FAUX News man Stephen Colbert, “lost his veto virginity” on July 19, five-and-a-half years into his administration. What issue was important enough for him to break his apparent vow of legislative chastity? A congressional appropriation, passed overwhelmingly by both the Senate and the House, that would have provided taxpayer...
Year: 2006
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An Undesirable Independence
Given the wars and rumors of war from North Korea to the Middle East, the last thing America needs is to reignite the proverbial powder keg in the Balkans, a region that has been fairly stable for the better part of this decade, especially when compared to the bloody 1990’s. That precarious stability could be...
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The Destruction of Lebanon
Much of the Western commentary on the violence in Lebanon has not been about the events themselves but about the commentators’ feelings about the warring parties. Israel’s staunch friends and apologists would not admit that the IDF has done anything wrong, or that it could do anything wrong, even if the whole of southern Lebanon...
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Death and Life of a Great Urban Thinker
The death on April 25 at the age of 89 of Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and several other books, has already set off a debate over her legacy. Admirers from the New Urbanist movement see her primarily as an advocate for compact, vibrant cities. They cite Jacobs...
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Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
Faculty parties are excruciating experiences—bad food and worse conversation. It has been many decades since American professors were scholars or scientists who could take an intelligent interest in a wide range of subjects, but they doggedly persist in repeating the opinions they have picked up like so much lint. Younger professors are perhaps the worst...
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In a Savage World
This latest volume of George Garrett’s stories and sketches is proof that the old fox has not forgotten how to raid our American cultural henhouse without running away with a few plump chickens. Chronicles readers should not have to be told that Garrett, a long-time contributing editor to this magazine, is the master of several...
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Tax Credits and Education Reform: No Simple Task
Over the last decade, the state of Arizona has made ground-breaking attempts at K-12 education reform. A 1997 law allowing taxpayers to steer a portion of their state income-tax liability toward a student at a private school now provides significant scholarship aid each year to 22,500 of the 54,000 students enrolled in private schools. With...
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The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion
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. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told the Southern Center for International Studies,...
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The Neoconservative Delusion
The Neoconservative dream of spreading “democracy” in the Middle East, a delusion wholeheartedly embraced by President George W. Bush, is rapidly becoming a nightmare. Pursuit of this utopian vision has already strengthened the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, propelled Hezbollah into the Lebanese government, and brought Hamas to power in the Palestinian Authority. In Iraq, it...
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Education to the Rescue
In the early 1900’s, Reconstruction studies (excluding the work of W.E.B. DuBois) approved quick restoration of states, Andrew Johnson’s strict constitutionalism, and white Southerners’ revolt against military and Republican rule (which consisted of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen). These studies—named the “Dunning School” for historian William A. Dunning, whose students applied his interpretation to individual Southern...
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Influx of Illegal Aliens
The European Union will set up rapid-reaction teams to deal with an increasing flood of illegal African immigrants on Europe’s southern flank. The decision was made by the European Commission at a July 19 meeting spurred on by complaints from Spain, Italy, and Malta. Illegal immigration to Spain via the Canary Islands has increased sharply...
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Republicans and DoMA
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...
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On Reconstructing Reconstruction
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...
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On the Culture War
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...
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On Women in Combat
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...
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Educated at Home
“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 ...
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MONKEYS IN THE CLASSROOM: September 2006
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 ...
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The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion
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. ...
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Too Much Monkey Business: Inherit the Agitprop
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...
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Those Ignorant of History, etc., etc.
President Bush is in Hungary to join the celebrations of the failed 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and this is one Yale graduate on whom the lessons of history are not lost. Bush told the world:
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Yes, They Have More Money
Warren Buffet has made the biggest “philanthropic” donation in the history of the universe. The largest part of the gift goes to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Why? Obviously, Mr. Buffet is just smart enough to make nearly $40 ...
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Church Business
Church conventions are the business of summertime in democratized Christian America. While normal, sane men are taking their boys to ball games or running trot lines by the light of a Coleman lantern, grown men (and women) are sitting in earnest before professional parliamentarians and video monitors in conference centers across the fruited plane, armed...
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Srebrenica
Nicholas Burns, the U.S. undersecretary of state, declared, at a press briefing he gave after returning from a recent trip to the Balkan hot spots, that former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic “ordered the execution of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica.” Over the last few years, I have sought to get at the truth...
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A Position of Poverty
It is all very well, strolling arm in arm through the hothouse of gloriously midsummer fiction, snatching a vermouth and bitters in the shadow by Fouquet’s, hailing a taxi some gilded moments later; it is all very well when you have the money to get yourself to Paris, to pay for the perfumed drinks, to...
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Noche de Desastre
The morning after meeting Juanito Villalobos, Héctor, throwing Dr. Spock’s strictures to the wind, put his foot down when Dubya demanded to be taken to the Lion Habitat immediately after the family’s return from breakfast at McDonald’s. His patience was suddenly at an end. Although the Habitat itself was free, the Villas’ suite by now...
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Genuine Outrages
I admit to being a biased reviewer. Donkey Cons is a book about the Democratic Party, and I will say up front that I don’t much care for the Democrats. Consider a sorry, random list: Kennedy (pick one), Pelo-si, Schu-mer, Clinton (pick one), Dean, Kerry, Lieber-man. The names alone are enough to turn one’s stomach. There...
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The Idea of Socialism
The received wisdom today seems to be that, with the downfall of Soviet communism, socialism has lost its pungency. Not only has Marxism proper reputedly crumbled, together with the Berlin Wall, but the somewhat watered-down type of socialism that survives Marxism has been forced to come to terms with its archrival, economic liberalism, which is...
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Right Deserves Might
“A combination of St. Paul and St. Vitus.” —Ascribed to John Morley The world could use a few more volumes devoted to Grover Cleveland; it has little need for more books about Theodore Roosevelt. But if more there must be, at least the two under consideration here explore terrain not yet strip-mined. Patricia O’Toole begins...
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Marx’s and Engels’ Illegitimate Offspring
If someone is overheard referring to the system of U.S. public finance as “socialist,” most Americans within earshot will write him off as a conservative crank who is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. After all, Karl Marx is long gone, and so is his most ardent American disciple, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,...
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The Natural History of the Night Watchman State
Liberalism, in all its guises, is a vision of the final form of political association. All history is viewed as a slow and painful struggle toward the realization of the liberal state. Other forms of political association are not denied value, but only because they can be seen as approximations to liberalism. The universalism of...
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The Meaning of Racism
Racism is the issue of our time, particularly in Britain, with her legacy of colonialism, and in the United States, with her history of slavery. Race is the ultimate taboo, and careers, such as that of Trent Lott in the United States or those of various British Conservative MPs, have been permanently ruined by one...
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Leonardo’s Little Joke
The Da Vinci Code Produced by Columbia Pictures Directed by Ron Howard Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman from the novel by Dan Brown Distributed by Sony Pictures At one point in The Da Vinci Code, the marvelously funny movie based on Dan Brown’s as nearly hilarious novel, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), renowned cryptologist for the Direction...
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Why I Am Not a Socialist
Though Chesterton disliked socialism intensely, he did not regard it as the most serious danger facing Western civilization. Writing in 1925, he describes the socialist state as something “centralized, impersonal, and monotonous” but suggests that this is also an accurate description of the societies in the modern industrialized West that regard themselves as enemies of...
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Republican Rapture
Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy is divided into three parts held together, at times, only by the most tenuous of rhetorical threads. The first deals with the perilous politics of Big Oil and American imperial overreach; the third, with the looming threat to American prosperity represented by out-of-control national debt and what Phillips calls the “financialization...
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Reading Obituaries
Reading obituaries is part of reading the newspaper and can be oddly rewarding. It’s instructive and even inspiring to read about lives and careers. Sometimes, we read about strangers, sometimes celebrities, sometimes even people we know—or knew. The gravity of the occasion requires a formulaic response: Without considering the matter, we all know how an...
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3:00 A.M. in America
In Decade of Nightmares, Philip Jenkins considers how the progressive and “forward-looking” decade of free love, drugs, and cultural revolution led to the reactionary “counterrevolution” of the 1980’s, personified by Ronald Reagan. The author gives fair play to both sides of the various debates, which makes for interesting reading. It is often difficult to tell,...
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The I-Word
Your Excellency: This past May, I attended commencement ceremonies at Christendom College, where James, the oldest son of my oldest friend, was graduating with a degree in philosophy. Some of our fellow countrymen would declare such a degree about as useful as the dresses once modeled by Twiggy. (Do you remember Twiggy, Bishop? She was...
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A Liberal Policy
In regard to the recent controversy over illegal immigration, allow me to offer a few liberal proposals. The problem could be easily and immediately solved by putting all illegal aliens to work constructing a wall across the entire southern border. (They make up 25 percent of the construction industry, anyway.) And, at below minimum wages,...
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Thoughts on Socialism
One day, perhaps, a great history of socialism will be written. A daunting task, but not impossible, since socialism, the “ism,” is not very old—a relatively new phenomenon, during the last 200 years or even less. A history of social justice; a history of the working classes; a history of the poor—that would overwhelm any...
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After Zarqawi: The New Thirty Years’ War
When the U.S. government toppled Sad-dam Hussein in 2003, it thought regime change would help bring democracy to Iraq, and then to the rest of the region. President Bush and his aides based their expectations on the premise that politics in the Middle East revolves around the relationship between individuals and the state, as it...
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Letter From Hvar: Withstanding the Fire
Three years ago, half of the long, narrow Croatian island of Hvar burned, including 200-year-old Mediterranean pines and much of the island’s three major crops—lavender, grapes for wine, and olives. Fortunately, most of the larger towns and some of the villages were spared. Three firebombers tried valiantly, but the bora wind was so strong that,...
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Guadalcanal: An Emotion, Not a Name
In most history textbooks today, coverage of the war in the Pacific consists of a summary of the Battle of Midway, a brief mention of leapfrogging islands, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Battle of Midway is almost invariably described as the “turning point” in the Pacific campaign that put the Japanese...
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Black Like Me
Rockford alderman Ann Thompson owns a cleaning service. That, in itself, is not surprising; while Rockford aldermen receive some benefits that are traditionally reserved to full-time employees (such as health insurance), they are paid a part-time stipend, and only those who are retired or independently wealthy could afford not to have another job. For months...
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Israeli-Arab Conflict
The Holy Land’s long, hot summer started with a spate of rocket attacks by Palestinian militants based in Gaza on the Israeli border town of Sderot. Over 100 homemade Kassems had been fired by the last week of June, resulting in civilian casualties and calls for the return of Israeli troops to the Gaza Strip—a...
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Decline Without Fall
Stephen Glain, a former Middle East correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, joins a long list of journalists, pundits, and think-tank analysts who have endeavored, since the World Trade Center attacks, to help America understand the Arab world. In his first (and, so far, only) book, he argues that the relationship between economics and political...
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A Serious Third Party?
The looming amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants is deeply unpopular with millions of Americans, and for good reason: If the immigration bill the Senate passed in June gets through the House, this nation is finished. The bill would not only legalize some ten million illegal aliens but bring in five times that many—legally—over the...
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America’s Other War
Americans are understandably concerned about the grave security situation in Iraq. The United States has suffered more than 2,500 fatalities in that conflict and has yet to defeat the insurgency. Indeed, the level of violence in Iraq is increasing, and much of that violence now consists of sectarian bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites. The American...
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Socialism Is Theft
The troubles of youth have long been a staple of popular fiction. In 19th-century fiction, wellborn young men borrowed against their future inheritance in order to pay for the wine, women, and song that red-blooded young men have always pursued. In the mid-20th century, readers were titillated by tales of urban ethnic kids—Irish, Jewish, black—whose...
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Russia’s Demographic Crisis
On May 10, Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised his audience during his annual address to the Federal Assembly. Most of his hour-long speech had gone as expected: He spoke on economics, technological innovation, and the need to rebuild the country’s infrastructure. Then the former KGB officer shifted tack: “And now for the most important thing.” ...
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On Stopping the Flow
Having read Steven Greenhut’s editorial in the June issue (American Proscenium), I must ask: Why is Mr. Greenhut not against all immigration? In order to be consistent with the general tenor of his article, he should be totally against any kind of immigration right now, as am I. I often hear people say that they...