While it was gratifying to see you take note of George Packer’s important book The Assassins’ Gate, Ivan Eland’s tepid review (May) gives only grudging praise to perhaps the most incisive reportage so far of our involvement in Iraq. Packer’s book is not, as Eland suggests, merely an exposé of the Bush administration’s incompetence. It...
Year: 2006
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We Are All Socialists Now—August 2006
PERSPECTIVE Socialism Is Theft by Thomas FlemingThe thievery we know and love. VIEWS The Natural History of the Night Watchman Stateby Donald W. LivingstonA culture of autonomy. Thoughts on Socialismby John LukacsThe failure of Economic Man. The Idea of Socialismby Claude PolinA heresy and its legacy. Marx’s and Engels’ Illegitimate Offspringby David A. HartmanA nation...
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Church Shopper
Like the French, we Americans live in, to borrow from Claude Polin, a “me-first” society. Each and every man is the measure of all things, his own arbiter of that which is beautiful, true, and of good report. Reared on the Disney principle (You can be whatever you want to be, or, Be true to...
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Dressing for Progress
The direction taken by progress to the America of the future, as I saw it, was toward abstraction. If one looked to the natural world to supply the measure of what was concrete, then this world was long in the past, perhaps not actually with the dinosaurs, but certainly with the Model T and the...
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O Literature, Thou Art Sick
The present condition of literature (as that term is ordinarily understood), at least in America, is obviously unhealthy. Its illness is the result not only of internal undermining, “the invisible worm” of Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” but of external conditions, the “howling storm” on which the worm (however implausibly) rode. External and internal decline, all...
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A Desert Idyll
For Héctor, Las Vegas was the American city. The Strip at night suggested, Héctor thought, an explosion in a fireworks factory—all the flashing, soaring, running, bursting lights in every color of the universe; the gaudy hotels, like upended cruise ships; the fancy stores, luxurious casinos, and romantic cocktail lounges; his compatriots crowding everywhere and jabbering...
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Ariadne’s Ball
There are innumerable topics of historical study, but an historian has, I believe, to choose among three styles of history. The first, seemingly the most popular among academics these days, concentrates on facts (i.e., physical evidence). The difficulty with this history is its avowed loathing of any interpretation of the facts by the historian; the...
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Culture War: Fighting On
“Transcend yourself and join in the universal struggle to bring about the self-transcendence of all men!” —Karl Marx Culture, as the term is used in America in our times, covers a vast territory with ill-defined frontiers. There is primitive culture (flint spearheads, animal and human sacrifice). There is high culture (Shakespeare, Michelangelo). There is, or...
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Down to Earth—With a Thud!
The history of Berlin over the past 16 years—more exactly, since the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989—offers an almost classic example of how wild dreams conceived in a moment of euphoria can so easily collapse into a mood of grudging resignation. Overnight, the divided city, which had previously had two town...
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The Reign of Grantham
“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley Media commentators covering David Cameron’s incumbency as Tory leader have remarked—often gleefully—on how unpopular Cameron’s Labour-like policies are with the “traditional right.” By this, they mean the Thatcherite rump of the party (probably still the numerical...
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Hollywood Blues
“A fact is not a truth until you love it.” —Shelby Foote A while back, I wrote a piece for a Festschrift in honor of Walter Sullivan—Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations. My piece, “Places We Have Come From, Places We Have Been,” argued that my own fiction and poetry, like that of so many...
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Nobody’s Going to Help Us
United 93 Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by Paul Greengrass United 93 is the extraordinarily convincing faux-documentary of what might have happened aboard the fourth plane hijacked on September 11, 2001. Flight 93 was the one that may have been headed for the Capitol in Washington, D.C., until its passengers stood...
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RUOK? AWHFY?
I do not live in a painting by Magritte or by De Chirico or even by Carmen Cicero—no, really, I don’t, honest, scout’s honor, no kidding—but sometimes I get the creepy sensation that I do. That sinking feeling is an identifiable vertigo not caused by imposing stimuli, such as intimidating heights, but by lesser, humdrum disconnects,...
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The Grand Manner
The culture war takes many forms—or, perhaps, we should say that the war has many fronts, and that the musical conflicts arising from this war are significant ones. Thus, we are convinced, when we approach a car that delivers a pounding reverb of bass, that the driver is not only cultivating a hearing loss that...
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A Better Way
On April 14, the front-page headline of USA Today read, “More say U.S. focus should be home.” The story cited a USA Today/Gallup poll that found that nearly half of Americans thought the United States “Should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own.” Similarly,...
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Our Little Brown Brothers
The History Book Club has done us a good service by reprinting Leon Wolff’s Little Brown Brother, published originally in 1960, before we had learned to be politically correct or had figured out that we were building an empire. In fact, in 1960, most of us had not realized that our foreign policy had been...
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The Big Word
What is culture, anyway? It’s one of those baffling words that at first seem to mean a narrow range of things (stuff such as “grand opera”) and then turn out to cover just about everything—even the New York Post, if you stretch it far enough. As with art and history, you may find yourself using...
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By Any Means Necessary
Was there a point at which American liberals consciously adopted Jacobinism, or did it just creep up on them gradually? This question was brought into rather sharp focus earlier this year when the PBS series American Experience presented an expensive two-part documentary entitled “Reconstruction: The Second Civil War.” The series recounted the story of Reconstruction,...
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The New Reality
The Washington Post calls it “The New Reality.” Today, women aren’t just flying fighter aircraft or serving on ships, away from action on the ground: They fight in ground combat units, lose limbs, and die in battle. Amputee Lt. Dawn Halfaker, the main subject of the Post’s article (“Limbs Lost to Enemy Fire, Women Forge...
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The Saint of the Sourdoughs
More than 20 years ago, I presented a paper on the Old West at an historical conference and was surprised to find that I upset several female professors in the audience. I had not disparaged their frontier sisters. Quite the opposite: I described how strong, courageous, enterprising, and successful were many of those pioneer women. ...
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Not Fade Away
At first glance, the area around Anthony Rudis’s 614-acre farm outside Monee, Illinois, seems closer to my hometown in Michigan than it does to Chronicles’ hometown of Rockford, Illinois. (As the crow flies, the distance between Monee and Spring Lake is almost the same as the distance between Monee and Rockford.) Having traveled the 290/294...
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One Hell for All
In Sartre’s grim play No Exit, a man and two women are in Hell, which, in this case, is a brightly lit drawing room furnished in the style of deuxième empire. At one point, the man, Garcin, famously quips that “hell is other people” (“l’enfer, c’est les autres”). One of the women, Inès, eventually responds...
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Violence in Iraq
Violence in Iraq has escalated, following the February 22 attack on the revered Shiite shrine al-Askari in Samarra. Some 200 Sunni and Shiite mosques were attacked, burned, or bombed in the two-month period after the attack. The weekly toll of explosions, retaliatory attacks, and targeted killings has prompted many commentators to describe the chaotic conflict...
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Violent Revolution
This past spring, while Congress was engaging in its usual mock debate about tightening immigration, hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans took their case to the streets. In the first round of demonstrations, Chicanos, waving Mexican flags, demanded rights for illegals and declared that all those who favored enforcing the law were racists. We all heard...
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Live Free! (Kill Your Lawn)
Americans love their lawns. They spend $40 billion per year—more than the gross national product of most countries—to create the perfect lawn. Taken together, all these lawns would cover the entire state of Kentucky. Lawns are everywhere, from trailer parks and executive mansions to businesses, churches, and recreational areas. American agronomists have created so many...
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An American Dilemma
In 1976, the Episcopal Church, U.S.A., met in General Convention to consider, among other things, two questions: the adoption of a new Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of women. Whether they knew it or not, the delegates were actually resolving a deeper, more disturbing dilemma: whether to remain orthodox or to remain respectable....
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Ten Most Wanted List
The FBI’s most recent Ten Most Wanted List was published on May 6. In this, the fifth year of our Global War on Terror, it may come as a surprise to some that the latest addition to the list isn’t a terrorist or even a murderer, but Warren Jeffs, the leader of a bizarre sect,...
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The Fire Next Time (A Message to Culture Warriors)
Houston now has a professional soccer team, which is not something I’m especially excited about. The team’s initial moniker, however, apparently got a rise out of the Bayou City’s “Latino” residents, many of whom, we are told, “only came here to work.” Not only did these supposedly friendly worker bees get upset, but many of...
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Porter Goss and the CIA
Porter Goss wasn’t in a mood to discuss his May 5 departure from his post as CIA director after only two years on the job. Following the announcement of his resignation, Goss cryptically told reporters that his leaving was “just one of those mysteries.” Indeed, it was—neither Goss nor President Bush was in a hurry...
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On Hard Cases
Thomas Fleming’s reflections on the Schiavo case (“New Wine in Old Bottles,” Perspective, May) disappointed but did not surprise me, since, a few years back, he defended our government when it handed over Elian Gonzalez to the tender mercies of a totalitarian government. In both cases, the crux of his argument seems to be the...
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30 Years Fighting the Culture War—July 2006
PERSPECTIVE Violent Revolution by Thomas Fleming Women in bondage. VIEWS Hollywood Blues by George Garrett A culture of grand illusions. Culture War by Clyde Wilson Fighting on. Dressing for Progress by Andrei Navrozov A culture of lovelessness. An American Dilemma by Tom Landess The Episcopal Church (1976-2006). RUOK? AWHFY? by James O. Tate Communication in the vast wasteland. O Literature, Thou Art Sick by Catharine Savage Brosman The consequences of theory. INTERVIEW Rendering ...
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Imaginary Genocide
It seems that “noted scholar” Christopher Hitchens visited Georgetown, an institution that at one point was connected with the Catholic Church, and announced that Mother Teresa “helped kill millions of people.” Hitchens also falsely claimed that Mother Teresa had denounced contraception as one of the leading threats to world peace in her Nobel Laureate address,...
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Everybody Loves Paul
These are the days of shame for American Christians. Not the sort of shame, like Isaiah’s, that results from coming face to face with a holy God. (“Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips.”) Instead, it is the sort that Buck Dorkman feels in the school cafeteria, when he picks up...
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The News
A.D. Sertillanges’ advice to anyone who wishes to accomplish intellectual work includes the following admonition: As to newspapers, defend yourself against them with the energy that the continuity and the indiscretion of their assault make indispensable. You must know what the papers contain, but they contain so little; and it would be easy to learn...
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The Courage to Defy Prudence
On February 22, the South Dakota Senate, by a vote of 23-12, approved legislation banning nearly all abortions in the state. On February 24, the vote in the South Dakota House of Representatives was 50-18 (H.B. 1215). Twelve days later, Gov. Mike Rounds signed the measure into law. President Bush criticized the law as too...
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Breaking Ranks
Rod Dreher’s book labors under a few handicaps. First, there is the cloying title and absurdly long subtitle. In addition, the cover features a cutesy picture of a VW microbus with a GOP elephant painted above the grille. The back cover features a “Crunchy Con Manifesto” that is a bit simplistic. “We are conservatives who...
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Democracy: The Enlightened Way
Before American readers embark on this inquiry into the particular democracy that was born in France with the French Revolution, I should warn them that they had better be prepared to enter a world of ideas so removed from reality as to make it almost impossible to believe there were people who actually took those...
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Cincinnatus, Call the Office!
“ . . . a republican government, which many great writers assert to be incapable of subsisting long, except by the preservation of virtuous principles.” —John Taylor of Caroline On a summer morning in 1842, near the end of its session, the U.S. Senate was busy receiving committee reports. The Committee on the Judiciary reported...
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Word Power
V for Vendetta Produced and distributed by Warner Bros. Directed by James McTeigue Screenplay by Andy and Larry Wachowski Thank You for Smoking Produced by Room Nine Entertainment and ContentFilm Written and directed by Jason Reitman from the novel by Chistopher Buckley Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures “Words will always retain their power.” So says...
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Government by Judiciary
The two most prominent newspaper journalists covering the U.S. Supreme Court have written biographies of two of the most prominent justices of our time. Predictably, Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times, who has written Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey, and Joan Biskupic of USA Today, who recently published Sandra Day O’Connor:...
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A Government We Deserve
“A democracy, when put to the strain, grows weak and is supplanted by oligarchy.” —Aristotle The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz New York: W.W. Norton; 1,004 pp., $35.00 To write a book about democracy, a word that functions today as little more than an advertising slogan, an author should first...
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Death on a March Afternoon
Today, the remarkable life of Capt. Francis Warrington Dawson is little more than a footnote in the history of an era that brought an end in the South to Reconstruction and saw the advent of the “Redeemers” and their Conservative Regime. But in the 1870’s and 80’s, Dawson, founder of the Charleston News and Courier,...
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Democratizing Germany: Paving the Way for Hitler
The surprise victory of the militant Islamic group Hamas in recent Palestinian parliamentary elections is an ominous warning about the prospect of democratization that is either directly or, as in the Palestinian case, somewhat indirectly imposed from without. Perhaps Ghazi al-Jawar, the former provisional president of Iraq, was correct when he warned about the possible...
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The Way We Were
I am not by nature, I think, a grumpy old man. But, at the age of 60, I feel entitled to comment on some inescapable facts about the younger generation. If my judgments seem harsh, I can only invite the reader to try to refute them, if he can. Or if she can. (Equality requires...
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The Age of Verification
Some millennia after the Earth spun out of nothingness and began hosting life forms, there dawned the Age of Reptiles, which gave way to the Age of Mammals. Then came the Golden Age, the Age of Fable, the Age of Augustus, the Age of Migrations, the Dark and the Middle Ages, the Age of Absolutism...
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Talking About Conservatism: The Politics of Guilt
It is not easy nowadays even to mention the word conservative in Greece. Historical factors, as well as the cultural dominance of the left since the restoration of democracy in 1974, have put immense pressure on everyone who is trying to represent the right in the modern Hellenic Republic. Even when speaking of the ruling...
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Six Months After Katrina
Sitting at Mass in St. Theresa’s Church on Camp Street in New Orleans some six months after Hurricane Katrina, my eyes rise naturally above the altar. There, I see a large, ugly panel of various sheets of plywood and two-by-fours filling the vast hole where the fine old stained glass depicting an incident in the...
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A Few Bad Men
The results of two extensive studies were released too late for me to consider them in my column (“Truth and Consequences”) last month. Both the “Report on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and the 2006 Supplementary Report to...
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Neglected New Martyrs
Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who faced the death penalty in his native country for converting from Islam to Christianity, was granted political asylum in Italy and arrived in Rome on March 29. His release came after several weeks of intense pressure by the United States and other Western governments on Kabul to spare his life...