On being taken to Mass in the underground basilica at Lourdes, the late Msgr. Alfred Gilbey, that most courteous of men, was moved to comment, “It reminds me of nothing so much as a Nazi rally.” He was referring to the vast crowds, the raised central stage, and the spotlit altar of this concrete bunker. ...
Funny Games Produced by Celluloid Dreams Directed and written by Michael Haneke Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures After seeing Austrian director Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, I experienced an unaccustomed urge. I wanted to buy a .45. I’m sure this was not the reaction Haneke was hoping for, but he can hardly complain. After all,...
“Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will. Steam has enabled men to choose what law they will live under. Money makes place for them.” —R.W. Emerson While Pierre Manent’s Democracy Without Nations? concerns itself principally with the erosion of...
Your Excellency: I know May is a monster on your calendar, a whirl of confirmations requiring your presence in the backwater outposts of the Faith. The physical demands alone—the hours in the car, the parish suppers, the compliments and complaints—must weigh heavily, if you’ll pardon the pun. (Truth to tell, Your Excellency, you could gain...
On March 20, President George W. Bush marked the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war by stating that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power was and always will be the right one. His view is not that of the majority of Americans, who are citing the high costs in American...
Last December, Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams was roundly criticized for publicly denying the Christmas story. “Archbishop Says Nativity a Legend,” the Daily Telegraph headline screamed, igniting a transatlantic controversy over the ostensibly Grinch-like prelate. In fact, the archbishop of Canterbury was pointing out that much of the popular imagery surrounding the Nativity scene is not...
Venezuela, once the beauty queen of Latin American democracies, has lost her good looks. Today, the oil-rich country is more often compared with communist Cuba than with democratic Costa Rica. Venezuela’s dramatic fall from grace has many causes, but most would blame Hugo Chávez Frias, her president since 1998 and, today, Latin America’s most successful...
Jack Bauer is an American hero—of sorts. He tortures suspects. And executes them. And decapitates them. “I’m gonna need a hacksaw,” he famously declared after dispatching a pervert who knew the men behind a planned nuclear attack on Los Angeles. If you have never watched the television program 24, you should try it for two...
It was by all accounts reminiscent of the Rev. Dr. King himself and even—dare we say it?—of the Great Emancipator. Yet whatever its emotive puissance, Barack Hussein Obama’s recent oration on race was reminiscent of King and Lincoln in more ways that one: It was a few threads of truth stitched into a tapestry of...
For most of American history, federal law enforcement consisted only of U.S. marshals serving in the territories of the West. Their legacy is decidedly mixed. Many were appointed purely for their political connections, and graft and corruption were not unusual. The first U.S. marshal for Colorado Territory was accused of embezzling federal funds. The third...
“I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.” The inauguration of the first black president of the United States on January...
Several years after he was forced into retirement, Otto von Bismarck was asked what could start the next major war. “Europe today is a powder keg,” he replied, “and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal . . . I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you...
It was the merry month of May, 40 years ago. I had been living in Paris for a decade, had just moved into a beautiful farmhouse ten miles west of the city, had recently become a bachelor again at age 31, and had given up competitive tennis for polo and the Bagatelle polo club. My...
In recent months, supporters of the mission in Iraq have been in high spirits. They insist that the “Surge”—the strategy of deploying an additional 30,000 U.S. troops, which President Bush announced in December 2007—has turned around the dire security situation. The Bush administration, they believe, has finally adopted the right approach to Iraq. War proponents...
After the recent shootings on the campus of Northern Illinois University, network-news programs were filled with helpful proposals for dealing with the growing problem of school violence. The suggestions were the predictably inane and irrelevant products of post-Christianity’s impoverished imagination: more counseling for shocked and grieving students, a university warning system complete with a database...
We passed the hand warmer around on a cold day in December. Matthew, my 11-year-old son, got creative and stuck the thing in his shoe. Rachel, who was spotting for us, didn’t like it much, but she used the hand warmer anyway. It was that cold; our fingers and toes burned. I look through the...
Probably the last thing that would have occurred to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer on his way to meet “Kristen” in Room 870 of D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel was that both he and the Emperor’s Club VIP were under FBI surveillance for federal crimes—prostitution and a financial crime called “structuring.” Traditionally, the enforcement of criminal law...
It is fitting that one of the signal events of what will likely become the second Bush recession has been the Federal Reserve’s propping up of the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns. For years, Wall Street has opposed similar bailouts of old-line manufacturing firms being swept away by the tsunami of free trade and has...
PERSPECTIVEBeastie Boysby Thomas Fleming VIEWSFederales, Gringo Styleby Roger D. McGrathThe exponential growth of federal police. Do We Want a Federal Police Force?by William J. QuirkThe Supreme Court and Congress versus the people. Jack Bauer, Agent of Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.by R. Cort KirkwoodAmerica’s most wanted. NEWSThe Surge “Success”by Ted Galen CarpenterTriumph of hope over experience. REVIEWSTowers of...
The foolishness of political debate in America has discouraged me from writing this column, but I have decided to come out of semi-retirement to ask this chicken-and-egg question: Which came first in America, the narcissistic obsession with personal trivia or the blogosphere? In other words, did Internet blogging reduce the mentality of young Americans to...
“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the closing couplet of “The Hollow Men.” Eliot’s poem was written after the Great War of 1914-1918 had carried off 9 million soldiers, wounded twice as many more, brought down the Romanov, Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires, and ushered...
The great events of the world take place in the brain. —Oscar Wilde A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. —G.B. Shaw . . . a brave nation fights only because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can. —Ilana Mercer War is a racket....
The neocons may yet get their war on Iran. Ever since President Nouri al-Maliki ordered the attacks in Basra on the Mahdi Army, Gen. David Petraeus has been laying the predicate for U.S. air strikes on Iran and a wider war in the Middle East. Iran, Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee, has “fueled...
Scoffers may deride the proposition I find instinctively plausible, that the consonants and the vowels of speech are its masculine and feminine constituents, though the same scoffers would not think to keep a professor from speaking of male rhymes or an electrician of female plugs. Yet the role of women in many societies, historically considered,...
“If Mel Torme is ‘The Velvet Fog,’ shouldn’t I at least be ‘The Elegant Mist’? Surveys indicate that even during station identification, which this is, you enjoy hearing my radio voice. From the studio at the antenna farm, I, Luther Craft (formerly Larry Krabenhoff), read your news, weather, commercials. I take requests, introduce singers, bands. ...
The holidays were fast approaching, and, for the first time in his life, Héctor could find no joy in the prospect of the Christmas season. Homesick, guilt-ridden, pinched in his wallet by his irregular business schedule, and worn down by the rigors of patrol with the Critter Company, he felt physically and mentally exhausted. The...
Last year in England, we marked the 60th anniversary of the voluntary granting of independence to India and Pakistan; it was also the year in which our military began to leave Iraq. Soon, the last of the British troops will march out of Basra with their band dolefully playing “The World Turned Upside Down.” Iraq...
At the close of 2007, the bloated inventories and declining prices of residential housing confirmed that the real-estate bubble had burst. This was triggered by losses on collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs), which are based on pools of “subprime” mortgage collateral. Residential prices have not yet fallen below the levels of 2001 (when the bubble began)...
Knocked Up Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by Judd Apatow Juno Produced and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Produced by Mobra Films Directed and written by Cristian Mungiu Distributed by IFC Films Thirty-five years ago,...
“Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.” —William Hazlitt The “prejudice against prejudice,” as Theodore Dalrymple ironically terms it, has become so culturally pervasive that many—perhaps most—people are completely unaware that the term has not always been exclusively pejorative. The Latin prejudicare, in...
I cannot remember the occasion, but I will not forget the voice—female, authoritative, and poised—that intoned a dismissal of the so-called yuppies as follows: “They oversee the distribution of toilet paper!” I was a bit thrilled by the superior attitude, being even then no young upwardly mobile professional myself. I thought about the matter and concluded...
An established authority on film, Professor Basinger has updated her monograph on the films of Anthony Mann for good reason. Not only has her original edition of 1979 long been out of print, it has been in much demand. This second edition of Anthony Mann will mean that a new generation of students of film,...
We have now entered a new age which will not have a name or a designation until, I think, at least one or two centuries from now: But then, such is the evolution of historical terminology. Yet we should be able to recognize at least some of its apparent characteristics. One (to my old-fashioned mind,...
In the tumultuous six months between his election in November 1860 and the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, Abraham Lincoln rejected all diplomatic efforts to resolve the deepening crisis peacefully. In the political dispute with the newly constituted, but militarily weak, Confederate States of America, there would be no meaningful negotiations. No...
“Concern in Jerusalem: Obama Is Getting Closer to the Presidency” was the headline on the front page of Ma’ariv, an Israeli daily. “Sources in Jerusalem are worried over the erosion in the support for Hillary Clinton who is considered more supportive of Israel,” the paper reported after the Iowa caucuses, reflecting the rising sentiment among...
After the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2005, Poland finally appeared to have recovered from her postcommunist malaise, having brought a coalition of center-right and patriotic parties to power. These included the Law and Justice Party (PiS), led by the twin Kaczynski brothers, Lech and Jaroslaw; the ultra-Catholic League of Polish Families (LPR), led by...
At 3:00 p.m. on February 14, I was sitting in the political-science graduate assistants’ office in DuSable Hall at Northern Illinois University. Ten of us were chatting, waiting for 3:30 classes. At 3:10, my friend’s cell phone rang. “Joe just called,” she said after hanging up, her face ashen and her eyes wide. “He says...
In his latest book, Day of Reckoning, Pat Buchanan argues that hubris, ideology, and greed are among America’s deadliest enemies. Hubris led to overreach. Hegemonic neoconservative ideology turned most of the world against the United States. And free trade has become a no-think cult that permits a greedy few to destroy America’s economic position for...
In the 1960’s and 70’s, when European countries were admitting large migrant populations from predominantly Muslim regions, Western governments had a powerful vested interest in encouraging the growth of politicized Islam of the straitest sect. European political attitudes were shaped absolutely by the Cold War confrontation, and the Middle East featured chiefly as a theater...
If you want know what’s wrong with higher education, look no further than Gene Nichol, the recently ousted president of Virginia’s College of William and Mary. First, he banished an iconic cross from the chapel in the school’s Sir Christopher Wren Building, the oldest continuously operating college building in the United States. Then, he let...
I was recently visiting with an old Marine Corps buddy, Ralph Willis, at his home on California’s central coast. At 86, he is one of the fortunate few who are still alive to describe their experiences fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. Ralph put down some of his memories in My...
The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, the politicians and pundits tell us every evening on the news. Lost in the rhetoric is any concern for members of the middle class, who are in danger of becoming nothing more than a footnote in future histories of the United States. If England...
The unilateral declaration of independence by the Albanian leadership in Kosovo on February 17, and the subsequent recognition of the new entity by the United States and most E.U. countries, crowned a decade and a half of iniquitous U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia. By recognizing “Kosova,” the White House has made a great leap...
I do not normally take pronouncements from show-business folk seriously—they are almost always publicity ploys—but in the Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg case against Beijing’s “Genocide Olympics,” I will gladly make an exception. We all know that there is something rotten at the heart of modern sport, starting with the Olympics, which was, once upon...
How beastly the bourgeois is, Especially the male of the species D.H. Lawrence’s lines are still quoted, though most often by writers who know nothing else of his poetry. It is taken for granted that Lawrence was right to contemn the “middle-class values” of the whited sepulchers who pretend to virtues and tastes they do...
During much of the 20th century, Robert Frost was widely regarded as our greatest living poet. Yet the Frost poems that students used to read in college English classes were those more easily accessible: “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Typically, the professor would spend a day or two on Frost,...
In February, when 52-year-old Georgian billionaire and political exile Badri Patarkatsishvili died at his Surrey mansion, British media wondered if this might be a Georgian version of the Litvinenko affair. Patarkatsishvili had been a supporter of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s 2003 “Rose Revolution” but had lately been in opposition to the Georgian president, running against him...
In “The Curious Career of Billy the Kid” (Views), Gregory McNamee writes that, “For most of the 19th century, the American West was a fairly tranquil place,” adding in the same paragraph that, “In cities such as Denver, Seattle, and even Tombstone, few citizens knew how to use a firearm, owned a gun, or had...
While I greatly enjoyed reading Roger D. McGrath’s “Westerns” (View, February) and R. Clay Reynolds’s “The Death of the Western” (View), I was rather surprised by the absence of Sergio Leone’s name in both pieces. Leone’s four Italian Westerns from the 1960’s had an immeasurable impact on the genre; it can be argued that his...
In the tumultuous six months between his election in November 1860 and the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, Abraham Lincoln rejected all diplomatic efforts to resolve the deepening crisis peacefully. In the political dispute with the newly constituted, but militarily weak, Confederate States of America, there would ...