Who are the spear-carriers of government policies? This is a tale that puts pieces together over the course of a few decades. Neocons eat stories like this for breakfast. Like most teachers, I have learned at least as much from my students as they have learned from me. An Argentinian graduate student at St. Louis...
Year: 2008
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No More Girls in Bikinis
Just after the Berlin wall came down, I flew to Berlin with my German-Austrian wife and traveled around the city and its eastern parts. On visiting the Olympic stadium I told the taxi driver that my ...
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Bad Whitey 101
In this space in the June issue, readers learned about a flock of students from the American Studies program at Randolph College who flapped off to the Chicken Ranch Brothel in Nevada to study the profundities of ...
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A Perfect Storm Over Iowa
Take one part high fuel prices. Mix in stagnant wages and high consumer prices generally. Stir in global uncertainty and an ever-exploding human population. Add misplaced production and chimera-chasing. Add to all ...
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American Insouciance
Now that military officers selected by the Bush Pentagon have reached a split verdict convicting Salim Hamdan, a onetime driver for Osama bin Laden, of supporting terrorism, but innocent of terrorist conspiracy, do you feel safe? Or are we superpower Americans still at risk until we capture bin Laden’s dentist, barber and the person who...
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Democracy—A Flickering Star?
In his 1937 Great Contemporaries, Winston Churchill wrote, “Whatever else may be thought about (Hitler’s) exploits, they are among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world.” Churchill was referring not only to Hitler’s political triumphs—the return of the Saar and reoccupation of the Rhineland—but his economic achievements. By his fourth year in...
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Great American Inventions
Decaffeinated coffee. (What’s the point?) The hula hoop. Political nominating conventions. Criminal athletes. The Celebrity, a meritless and insignificant person famous for being famous. The Celebrity as a political force. Purposeless voting. Patriotic balloons. Carnival tent religion. Mass-produced food and patented food crops. Mothers in combat. Euphemisms for war: Preserving the Union, War to End...
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Marching Off Into Tyranny
In last weekend’s edition of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn updates the ongoing persecution of Sami Al-Arian by federal prosecutors. Al-Arian was a Florida university professor of computer science who was ensnared by the Bush regime’s need to produce “terrorists” in order to keep Americans fearful and, thereby, amenable to the Bush regime’s assault on U.S. civil...
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Angry Pygmies
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was one of the few giants of our age, a courageous witness against the irremediable evil of Communism and a prophetic voice against the dangers of amoral Western materialism. He also used to be a hero of American conservatives. But the sort of men who now are exalted in “mainstream conservatism” have a...
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Poor Mexico, Poor America: Extracts Omitted
I foolishly used an early version of my article. Rather than repost everything, I am putting in a few omitted extracts: Introduction“Poor Mexico,” sighed Porfirio Diaz, “so far from God, so close to the United States.” Though a hero in the Battle of Puebla (May 5, 1862) in which the Mexicans defeated French troops supporting...
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Letter From a Hot Town
Cimabue the painter, passing on the road to Bologna, saw, as he walked through the village of Vespignano, a boy called Giotto drawing a sheep on a flat piece of rock. This was the moment with which, more than a century later, Lorenzo Ghiberti, the sculptor and the first art historian of the Renaissance, began...
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“¡Mi Casa es su Casa!”
Héctor woke on New Year’s morning with a reverberating headache that made his wife’s remonstrations (in the pinch, AveMaría had been appointed an emergency designated driver to take the party home safely the night before) the more painful to bear. He felt thoroughly ashamed of himself—first for getting drunk, and second for . . ....
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The Necessary Century
“He saith among the trumpets, Ha, Ha! and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.” —Job 29:25 According to the fashion current in the publishing world today, the title of a book is a bit of catchy fluff, and the subtitle a ponderous, plonking sentence fragment indicating the...
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Letter From Australia: Don Bradman
You’re facing the veteran and famously accurate San Diego Padres pitcher Greg Maddux from a distance of 22 yards, armed only with a three-foot wooden club and your own nerve. To enliven the proceedings, Maddux interacts with you not from the traditional, essentially static crouch, but after a 20- or 30-yard headlong sprint from the...
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Gettysburg Agitprop
The field of Gettysburg is perhaps the closest thing to a sacred place, a Mount Olympus, to be found in our secular-minded land. The battle itself contains enough epic material for the admiration, contemplation, and inspiration of a hundred generations of Americans, if there should be so many. This is all lost on the U.S....
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The Burmese Tragedy
Even before being devastated by a killer cyclone on May 2, Burma was one of the world’s poorest countries. Renamed Myanmar by a military junta, Burma is also one of the most oppressed countries. In terms of brutality, cruelty, and venality, her government is in a league with North Korea. It comes as no surprise,...
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Alfred Hitchcock’s Empty Suit
In 1939, a short, fat Englishman named Alfred Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood at the invitation of David Selznick. Impressed by Hitchcock’s work in British film, Selznick thought he would be perfect to direct Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Things did not go well. Selznick was among the most overbearing of Hollywood producers. He...
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Good Night, Shyamalan
The Happening Produced and distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox and UTV Motion Pictures Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan The star of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, The Happening, demonstrates once more how unaccountably loathe producers are to give their boom microphones top billing. During the showing I attended last night, the boom mike...
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The Perfect Republic
Augustin Cochin (1876-1916), a French historian little known today, sought to provide a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of the French Revolution with an eye to discovering the reasons for the terror and butchery that arose in its course. The nature and depth of his motivations and concerns can be gleaned from his judgment that...
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Rockin’ in the 50’s
When the mode of music changes, Plato remarked, the walls of the city shake. When the mode of music changed back in the 1950’s, the denizens of Plato’s Pad—sorry, but there are so few opportunities to get in an allusion to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis these days—and their peers saw more fingers than...
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A Perfect Storm Over Iowa
Take one part high fuel prices. Mix in stagnant wages and high consumer prices generally. Stir in global uncertainty and an ever-exploding human population. Add misplaced production and chimera-chasing. Add to all that the floods of May and June 2008 that inundated much of Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, and you have a perfect storm—at least...
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Yankee, Go Home
Sixty years ago an incident lodged in my memory forever as it seems, as I walked with the beautiful redheaded young lady who paused to ask me a question. There above an old outbuilding—I hesitate to call it a barn—there was a weathervane appearing as the silhouette of a rooster. But this image was perforated...
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Yang and Soap Suds
Your Excellency: Right now the weather here is hotter than those vestments Pope Benedict refused to wear for World Youth Day. By noon the sidewalks wiggle with waves of heat, and the very air leaks terrestrial perspiration. The afternoons are too sultry to work in the garden of She-Who-Commands-My-Heart-and-My-Spade, and my preparations for teaching my...
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The Ultimate Insider
Who are the spear-carriers of government policies? This is a tale that puts pieces together over the course of a few decades. Neocons eat stories like this for breakfast. Like most teachers, I have learned at least as much from my students as they have learned from me. An Argentinian graduate student at St. Louis...
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Bad Whitey 101
In this space in the June issue, readers learned about a flock of students from the American Studies program at Randolph College who flapped off to the Chicken Ranch Brothel in Nevada to study the profundities of the cathouse. They also learned about yet another aesthete who believes emissions from the nether regions of the...
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Videites
You may have riches and wealth untold; / Caskets of jewels and baskets of gold. But richer than I you will never be— / For I had a mother who read to me. —Strickland Gillilan Perhaps more than most I wax nostalgic for the 50’s, which was not a decade but an era that began...
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Summertime Blues
Driving from Rockford to St. Paul, Minnesota, is a bit like going back in time. St. Paul (like La Crosse, Wisconsin, where we crossed over the Mississippi River just hours before it began to burst its banks) is relatively well preserved, unlike its clearly fraternal twin. Much of the city is stunningly beautiful—from the immaculately...
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The E.U.S.S.R. Marches On
The coalition of multicultural fanatics, postnational technocrats, neo-Marxists, and crooks who run the European Union had warned, until the very day of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (June 13), that its rejection would sound the death knell for the “united Europe” and mark the end of the world as we know it. But...
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Guantanamo Supreme
Do suspected Al Qaeda terrorists captured in Afghanistan and taken to the U.S.-operated prison at our naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to contest their detention in the U.S. civilian courts? According to five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, who agreed with an opinion by Justice...
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No More Girls in Bikinis
Just after the Berlin wall came down, I flew to Berlin with my German-Austrian wife and traveled around the city and its eastern parts. On visiting the Olympic stadium I told the taxi driver that my uncle, a hurdler, was the first athlete the Führer’s gaze fell upon as the parade of the 1936 games...
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Lost in the 50’s
It was about 1965, in Jimmy Dengate’s “club” in Charleston, when I got my first clue to what the 50’s had been all about. I met an unusual sportswriter. Let us call him Jack, if only because it was his real name. Jack was unusual, because he could write decent prose, knew something about sports,...
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Sex and Marriage in San Francisco
The California Supreme Court, in striking down the state’s ban on same-sex “marriage,” has issued a declaration of independence from the human race. Progressives have inevitably compared it to the legalization of interracial marriage, but the same progressives just as inevitably will hail the legalization of cross-species marriage as the next giant step for mankind. ...
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Liberty’s Close Call
Americans view liberty as a birthright guaranteed by a written Constitution and Bill of Rights. Feeling overly secure in their liberties, most cannot imagine any branch of the federal government abrogating constitutional rights such as the freedom of the press or of assembly. These First Amendment guarantees are enshrined in the Bill of Rights in...
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Kennedy Catholicism
The indifference of Catholic elected officials to Church teachings is so common that it rarely attracts attention, but there are occasional exceptions. When at least five fervently pro-abortion politicians took Communion at papal Masses this April, from the hands of the Pope’s representative to the United States, even the New York Times and the Washington...
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On Religion and Utopia
I am an admirer of Derek Turner’s writing and his work as editor of Right Now! and Quarterly Review. Yet I sense that he cuts John Gray undeserved slack in his review of Gray’s book, Black Mass: Religion and the Death of Utopia (“The Skeptical Mind,” Opinion, June). I have not read this book, nor...
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The Fabulous Fifties—August 2008
PERSPECTIVE Lost in the 50′sby Thomas Fleming VIEWS Yankee, Go Homeby James O. TateYankee, come home—Yankee, get lost. Videitesby Roger D. McGrathAn alien invader from the 50′s. Alfred Hitchcock’s Empty Suitby George McCartney50′s counterculture. NEWS The Burmese Tragedyby Doug BandowForeign hindrance, not aid. REVIEWS The Necessary Centuryby Chilton Williamson, Jr. Patrick J. Buchanan: Churchill, Hitler,...
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Niñatos Bestias
The following is the first in a series of translations of Chronicles articles into Spanish, as part of our outreach to the Spanish-speaking world. (TJF) Durante los días que siguieron a los recientes asesinatos a tiros ocurridos en el campus de la Northern Illinois University (la universidad del Illinois del norte) los noticiarios de las...
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Obama’s War?
“We have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in,” says Barack Obama of the U.S. war in Iraq. Wise counsel. But is Barack taking his own advice? For he pledges to shift two U.S. combat brigades, 10,000 troops, out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, raising American forces in that country...
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What’s Really Eating Obama/Wright?
[The discomfort of light skin.] Barack Obama has said that his mixed-race heritage would serve to make him a uniter. But the violently militant roots of Obama's church of 20 years, which advocate “the destruction of the ...
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Questions! Questions! Ever More Questions About the Way We Are Now
“You can’t make a republic without republicans.” —Stendhal Just asking— What happens to a “service economy” when people no longer have the money to pay for service? What happens when “precision” bombs and missiles are not really as precise as they are supposed to be? What happens to a country where judges make up the...
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Honorable Exit From Empire
As any military historian will testify, among the most difficult of maneuvers is the strategic retreat. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, Lee’s retreat to Appomattox and MacArthur’s retreat from the Yalu come to mind. The British Empire abandoned India in 1947—and a Muslim-Hindu bloodbath ensued. France’s departure from Indochina was ignominious, and her abandonment of hundreds...
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Karadzic’s Arrest: Bosnian Myths Rehashed
The spirit of the media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on July 21 is based entirely on the doctrine of non-equivalence inaugurated in 1992: Serbs willed the war, ...
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Little War Criminals Get Punished, Big Ones Don’t
National Public Radio has been spending much news time on Darfur in Western Sudan, where a great deal of human suffering and death are occurring. The military conflict has been brought on in part by climate change, according to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Drought is forcing nomads in search of water into areas occupied...
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Mission Impossible
Persuading a libertarian that a negotiation between one worker and a huge corporation is not a simple free market transaction. Persuading a libertarian that the Lord gave us the earth for our use, not for our maximum exploitation. Persuading a Republican that tariffs were NOT responsible for America’s past prosperity. (Tariff “protection” did not create...
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Letter From Vienna: Antemurale, Once Again
The socialist-conservative coalition led by Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, which collapsed on July 7, had been faltering for months. When I arrived in Vienna two days later, the only surprising element in what appeared to be a mundane story concerned its immediate cause. Eighteen months of endless bickering over Austria’s economic, fiscal or social policy could...
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The Popular Front at NR
Yet more proof that National Review has redefined itself as a fashionable font of social democracy recently came from Canadian interloper David Frum, who used successive posts at his diary to claim that, “Among the European dictators, [Francisco Franco] ranks behind only Hitler and Stalin in monstrousness,” and to denounce Jesse Helms for his “racialism.”...
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No More Blank Checks for War
After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, Austria got from Kaiser Wilhelm a “blank cheque” to punish Serbia. Germany would follow whatever course its ally chose to take. Austria chose war on Serbia. And World War I resulted. On March 31, 1939, Britain gave a blank check to Poland in...
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Honestly, Abe!
“A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.” —Matthew 5:14 How many Americans are aware that Abraham Lincoln was well known for telling dirty stories, engaged in antics (like playing with his feet) when he did not want to answer questions, and was flippant when his attention was called to Union soldiers’...
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John McCain on Foreign Policy: Even Worse Than Bush
Over the years, John McCain has acquired a reputation as a maverick Republican. Independents and even some Democrats who loathe George W. Bush’s foreign-policy record seem to believe that McCain would be a significant improvement. In several GOP primaries earlier this year, most notably those in New Hampshire and Michigan, nearly one third of voters...
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What’s Good for Rockford Acromatics
Dean Olson, the chairman of Rockford Acromatic Products, an after-market auto-parts manufacturer, is a longtime supporter of Republican candidates. Still, he is not optimistic about the November election: “Even though the Democrats are in full rout, we’re not able to mount an effective challenge. I don’t see the leadership there.” While Rockford voters lean Democratic,...