“If the King James Bible was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it’s good enough for me!” Over the years, there have been many errors identified in the various printings of the so-called Authorized Version (it was never officially “authorized” by anyone) of the Bible, the most beloved translation of the Scriptures into English. H.A....
Readers of Chronicles know that the American war with Iraq is worthy of condemnation on many levels. Not only has it continued to earn our country the opprobrium of a number of Middle Eastern nations, and created frustration among many others, but the invasion and occupation of Iraq flies in the face of the classical...
Eugene McCarthy, R.I.P. When famous people die, they are usually overpraised in fulsome superlatives, well meant but losing all proportion. I’ve complained about this before, and I try to resist the temptation. I’ll try to resist it today; it won’t be easy but respect for the man himself forbids exaggeration of his virtues. He wouldn’t...
A few nights ago, some friends and I were on our way to a small get-together. As we ambled up the sidewalk, Rachel, whom I had met at the university I used to attend, commented that the neighborhood was rather “sketchy.” I almost hugged her. “Sketchy!” I nearly shouted. “That’s a word I haven’t heard in...
As 2005 drew to a close, the scandal over the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame potentially threatened to overwhelm leading figures in the Bush White House. Meanwhile, editors and journalists have been struggling to keep a straight face while affecting shock at the central revelation of the case—namely, that major news stories commonly derive...
PERSPECTIVE Lost in Translation by Thomas FlemingThe art of reality. VIEWS Mind Your Language!by James O. TateA sea of ruined words. Manners, Morals, Languageby Chilton Williamson, Jr.Forsaking the Beau-Ideal. A Trip to Smart-Mouth Collegeby Aaron D. WolfThe loss of sacred words. NEWS Riots in the Suburbsby Claude PolinThe programmed suicide of France. REVIEWS Seasoned Travelsby Catharine...
I truly enjoyed Scott P. Richert’s excellent review of Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge: A Reader (“Truth of Blood and Time,” December 2005)—a compendium of some of Professor Lukacs’s most insightful work. As noted by Mr. Richert, ISI, the publisher of this tome, has produced a terrific primer on the...
The lead pieces in the December issue (“The Beauty of Holiness”) are more mystifying than enlightening. Much of this issue consists of supercilious ridicule of poor souls who try to honor God with imitative architecture and inadequate art, followed by sympathetic words for moral and social degenerates who were prudent enough to repent before dying—or...
Following the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, John Walker Lindh, also known as Suleyman al-Faris and Abdul Farid, got his 15 minutes of fame the hard way. Or perhaps it is more proper to say that he was the object of a Two Minutes Hate by many on the right, even as his arrest...
Remember when Time’s man of the year, apart from the parade of presidential feebs and felons, was some hero or villain you had to respect, if not always admire? Among the heroes was the first recipient, Charles Lindbergh, as well as Charles de Gaulle and Lech Walesa. The villains included Hitler, Stalin, and Ayatollah Khomeini. ...
If you plan to read only one book on foreign affairs in the next year, you should read Paul Belien’s A Throne in Brussels. Belien is a lawyer and a journalist, a rare free-market advocate who understands the importance of ethnic identity. On one level, Belien’s book is a ruthless investigation of the history and...
In one of his earliest essays, Walker Percy expounded a theory of “Metaphor as Mistake,” and it is true that many insights, not all of them metaphorical, can arise from misunderstanding or, as happens to me more frequently these days, mishearing what someone has said. A psychiatrist friend, back about 1970, told me of a...
George W. Bush, between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, gave a series of speeches seeking to justify his policy in Iraq. The opening shot came at the Naval Academy in Annapolis on November 30, when he outlined the new “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq” and declared that there is no alternative to a complete...
A year ago, the prospects for peace in Israel-Palestine appeared more promising than at any other time after Bill Clinton’s failed Camp David initiative in 2000. Arafat’s death in November 2004 had removed a major cause of Palestinian corruption and incoherence, as well as the justification for Israel’s refusal to accept direct talks. Mahmoud Abbas’...
For the past 40 years, Rockford’s Midtown district has seen more downs than ups. Centered on Seventh Street from First Avenue to Broadway, southeast of the main part of downtown, Midtown—once a bustling commercial and cultural center at the heart of a Swedish neighborhood—was, for far too long, a haven for prostitution and drug use. ...
Intelligent design had its day in court in Dover, Pennsylvania, and the result was sadly predictable. So was the reaction to it. The evolutionist and atheist left ballyhooed the decision as another victory for science over superstition, and for the separation of Church and state. The intelligent-design crowd vowed to continue fighting, and talk radio...
The current debate about the state and future of higher education seems to center on the question of whether a college degree is a “privilege” or a “right.” The loudest argument is that any high-school graduate who has followed a “college pathway” and has made decent grades should be admitted to a state institution of...
This year marks the centennial of the publication of Owen Wister’s Lady Baltimore, a comedy of manners about a wedding cake. Or, rather, it is about an honorable young Charlestonian’s determination to keep faith with a decidedly dishonorable young woman whom he has, in a moment of fatal infatuation, promised to marry—thus, the necessity of...
In these biographically minded days, Professor Delbanco has not called his work a biography of Melville—his subtitle does not say “His Life and Work.” I think this distinction is not without significance, particularly because his book takes the form, if not the substance, of a literary biography: It follows the course of an author’s life...
Your Excellency: Please forgive my extended holographic hiatus. What with the “priestly scandals,” the “bishop scandals,” the decline and death of one pope and the election of another, I assumed you and your fellow shepherds had your hands full. Besides, I had little to offer by way of helpful suggestion. How could I? Our diocesan...
The phrase “Small is beautiful” was coined, or at least popularized, by the economist E.F. Schumacher, who chose it for the title of his ground-breaking international best-seller, published in 1973, that exploded like a beneficent bomb, demolishing, or at least throwing into serious question, many of the presumptions of laissez-faire economics. The subtitle of Schumacher’s...
Americans have never been big on “political theory.” In our nation’s early decades—and arguably, up to World War II—folks were comfortable with their republican form of government and its tenets of self-reliance and self-government. However, over the past 50 years, political thought—specifically concerning what the U.S. Constitution actually means—has undergone a radical transformation. During that...
Almost 50 years ago, William F. Buckley, Jr., made what was undoubtedly the shrewdest and most audacious move of his life. He invited his sister Priscilla to quit her job and join the staff of a magazine he had just started. To appreciate fully the depths of his brotherly nerve, it should be understood that,...
Good Night, and Good Luck Produced and distributed by Warner Independent and Redbus Pictures Directed by George Clooney Screenplay by Grant Heslov With all that has been revealed since the Soviet archives were opened to scrutiny in the 1990’s, does anyone still believe that Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was hunting witches where there was...
American soldiers have, for more than 200 years, risked life and limb for their country. The politicians who recruited and sometimes conscripted the soldiers routinely painted military service in glorious terms: You are protecting America—even the entire world. President George W. Bush continued in this tradition last Veterans Day. The Iraq occupation “is vital to...
Is there such a thing as the proper size of a political order? Westerners have inherited three visions of political size and scale: the Aristotelian polis; the Christian commonwealth; and the Hobbesian modern state. For Aristotle, the point of political order is the cultivation of human excellence. Since virtue cannot be learned except through apprenticeship...
As the 21st century began, Americans appeared to have every reason to consider themselves the most fortunate citizens in the world. Though there are problems in virtually every sector of our society, resolutions are still within our reach and capabilities. Although the abundant nonrenewable natural resources our forebears found for the taking have largely been...
On November 1, 2005, the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform issued its final report and received a chilly response from the proponents of tax reform (too much tax, and too little reform). However, its proposals constructively addressed key issues that could lead to a simplification of the tax code—to the extent that our...
The English middle orders from Ruskin onward have had an inbred prejudice against America. True, they may dress like mutant versions of Kurt Cobain and bundle themselves and their cloaca-tongued broods off to Disney World, but when you say “U.S.A.,” much of the professional class still thinks of headlines like “NEW JERSEY BABY BORN WITH...
Brilliantly original and insightful as Herr Prof. Doktor Teufelsdröckh’s Clothes, Their Origin and Influence remains more than a century and three-quarters after its initial appearance in print, a recent trip from Denver via London to Rome served as a reminder that a new—or, at least, a revised—Philosophy of Clothes is an essential need of what...
Cyprien has been on my mind since last week, when I put on again the blue Daum earrings that I brought back from Paris a few years ago. I hesitate to wear them when I am going out, although they don’t seem loose, and the hooks are not flimsy. What makes me nervous is just...
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on October 26 that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Invoking the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, he told an audience of 4,000 cheering students that a new conflict in Palestine would soon remove “this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world.” The statement, made in the midst...
After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the dike that had held back the military hordes of Asia from Europe collapsed. Very soon, the European nations realized that the new conquerors were not the bearers of any civilization, even primitive; instead, they were bloodthirsty destroyers, living parasitically on the Christian populations...
Few decisions require more prudence and judiciousness than when a country’s leaders determine whether to go to war. They must weigh the cost in lives, national treasure, and security against the price of inaction. Morality may enter their calculations through the application of just-war theory. They will listen to, if not necessarily heed, diverse voices...
In his discussion of Bill Clinton’s “mini-General Assembly” (Cultural Revolutions, November 2005), Dr. Srdja Trifkovic claims that Thabo Mbeki’s assertion—that such “traditional attitudes” of African men as violence against women and promiscuity do not play a significant role in spreading the disease—is highly controversial. Actually, Mbeki’s assertion is justified. Dr. Trifkovic should read “The Chemical...
I was glad to see Chronicles dedicate its November 2005 issue (“Reviving the American Dream”) to the Southern Agrarians. Thomas Fleming correctly pointed out that the Agrarians were not simply idle romantics. Their vision was political, defending organic communities against the ravages of communism and capitalism. Unfortunately, most of the Agrarians later abandoned this vision...
Ralph Reed long ago proved that he is no conservative. After Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary in 1996, Buchanan had a legitimate chance to overtake Bob Dole and emerge as the Republican presidential nominee. One of the major reasons he did not was the active (though largely behind-the-scenes) opposition of the Christian Coalition,...
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Kelo v. City of New London, a chill wind blew across the rural South. The Court upheld the decision of the city fathers of New London, Connecticut, to grant a private development corporation the right to condemn a middle-income residential neighborhood, evict the property owners,...
“In the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. . . . And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age.” The discussion of prophetic literature with which Chesterton begins The Napoleon of Notting Hill is itself an accurate piece of prophecy. ...
“Cincinnati is no mean city,” one of my Greek professors used to say when he wanted to illustrate the use of litotes. I lived not too far north of Cincinnati for three years and spent a good deal of time in what was and is one of the few cities of the Midwest to survive...
The riots in France were occupying my thoughts at the end of a long day, when the telephone rang. It was a friend who lives in Metz, a quiet town that is a long train ride away from Paris. “I’m looking out my window,” he said, “watching an apartment building going up in flames. A...
“Soldiers are the only hope against democrats.” —Wilhelm von Merckel The Bush administration’s crusade to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and build Iraq into a democratic model for the Middle East has become a highly controversial and divisive undertaking. Larry Diamond was not a supporter of the war in Iraq, but when his old friend...
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s slate of fairly modest governmental reforms went down to stinging defeat on November 8, 2005, leading Californians to ponder a future in which their flawed celebrity governor has little power and the public-sector unions—the targets of most of the governor’s failed initiatives—are more brazen than ever. Following the election, I spoke...
The terrorist bombings on July 7, 2005, in London were widely described as proof that the British multicultural model is flawed; few, however, noted that this crisis has an illustrious precedent, the assassination of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands. On November 2, 2004, a young Muslim, born in Amsterdam to Moroccan parents, shot Mr....
Alex Dragnich’s attempt to compress a multifaceted millennium of Serbian history into 160 pages is bold and could be considered audacious in a lesser man. So much has to be left out, and what is included has to be treated with such economy and such precision, that many a professional would cringe at the task....
American soldiers stumble upon a secret dungeon and discover dozens of emaciated prisoners—173 of them, to be precise—who had simply vanished from the face of the Earth over the previous weeks and months. Horrified GIs walk wide-eyed through the stinking chamber of horrors whose inmates grasp with difficulty that their ordeal is over. Most of...
The reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last June in Kelo v. City of New London has largely been edifying. Most commentators, and even many politicians, have greeted with horror the news that local and state governments are free to take property from one private owner to give it to another, as long as...
A remark I recently overheard on FOX News captured a key difference between Sir Alfred Sherman, whose assessment of the Thatcher years I now have in my hand, and those minicons who float on and off of FOX. Commenting on the visit of Prince Charles to the United States, one of the news interpreters began...
PERSPECTIVE Fortifying the Back Yardby Thomas FlemingUnearthing the remnants of real life. VIEWS Think Locally, Act Locallyby Scott P. RichertGood stewardship. Outgrowing the Pastby Tom LandessEminent domain down South. Aristotelian Worms in the Leviathanby Donald W. LivingstonHobbes versus the human scale. Small Is Beautiful Versus Big Is Bestby Joseph PearceE.F. Schumacher and true conservatism. STORY...