World War II has provided a vast amount of material for cinema in Europe, America, and Japan. Some if this is superb. Much of it is hokey entertainment and propaganda. We perhaps did not realise how hokey until the horrors of D-Day were portrayed in Saving Private Ryan. That useful ...
Year: 2009
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Another Bronx Cheer For Politicians
It helps to read history. We know, or should, that American life shows us nothing like the social and political conniptions that Germany experienced in the 1920s, France in the 1790s and the United States in the 1850s. But something is cooking. Indignant people—I’m sidestepping the adjective “angry” so as to avoid connotations—don’t mysteriously materialize...
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Health Care Deceit
The current health care “debate” shows how far gone representative government is in the United States. Members of Congress represent the powerful interest groups that fill their campaign coffers, not the people who vote for them. The health care bill is not about health care. It is about protecting and increasing the profits of the...
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Globalism vs. Americanism
Down at the Chinese outlet store in Albany known as Wal-Mart, Chinese tires have so successfully undercut U.S.-made tires that the Cooper Tire factory in that south Georgia town had to shut down. Twenty-one hundred Georgians lost their jobs. The tale of Cooper Tire and what it portends is told in last week’s Washington Post...
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An Invitation to The John Randolph Club
“You may all go to Hell; I will go to Texas,” said David Crockett to the voters before departing for San Antonio and the Alamo, where he, Jim Bowie, Buck Travis, and 186 other brave Americans gave their lives for liberty. As the entire United States seems bent on following Davy’s instructions, a few brave...
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Obama at the Rubicon
If the aphorism holds—the guerrilla wins if he does not lose—the Taliban are winning and America is losing the war in Afghanistan. Well into the eighth year of war, the Taliban are more numerous than ever, inflicting more casualties than ever, operating in more provinces than ever and controlling more territory than ever. And their...
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EXCLUSIVE: Guns and Roses
When one William Kostric walked into a protest outside a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at which the President of the United States was present, carrying a loaded gun—“Of course it was loaded,” he told Chris Matthews later, “what kind of fool would carry around an unloaded gun?”—he ...
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Why Not Crippling Sanctions for Israel and the U.S.?
In Israel, a country stolen from the Palestinians, fanatics control the government. One of the fanatics is the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Last week, Netanyahu called for
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Christian No More
C.S. Lewis wrote about the “death of words.” In essence, he suggested that, whenever we feel compelled to append a noun with the adjectives true or real, it is safe to say that the noun has lost its meaning, or died. “No, no, we’re true conservatives.” There’s my example. So what do you do, then? ...
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Berlusconi’s Will To Fight
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has come under ferocious attack for his alleged relationships with several women, including a teenage girl. These stories are surfacing exactly when one aspect of his policy—the fight against illegal immigration, which was part of the government program endorsed by the majority of voters in the last general election—is starting...
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The Brazilian Cow
In the middle of the 19th century, Sydney Dobell wrote a poem that contained the following line: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” This excursion into the absurd c. 1850 is readily recognized by readers of American poems or novels c. 1950 as a cry of the soul in torment. The...
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Freedom and Action
In this rich and dense book, Michael Allen Gillespie is self-consciously trying to correct the “standard” understanding of the origin of modernity. Rather than being the “victory of secularism,” modernity, he says, is a series of attempts to grapple with fundamental theological issues: the realities of God, man, and nature, and, in particular, how meaningfully...
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The Walk Up Cemetery Ridge
The private-school league’s middle-school basketball playoffs were home games for Prep. Prep is the town’s most expensive private school, and their gym is beautiful: spacious, air conditioned, the wall by the entrance made of plastic so the new, impressive weight room is visible on the other side of a hall. We met them in the...
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The Mystery of Animals
It seems that bipolarity is a significant element of human nature, mental as well as emotional. Human beings tend toward extremes in both thought and feeling, never more than when the subject of either is the animal kingdom with which we share our world. Most of mankind differentiates among animals as ferocious beasts, objects of...
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Bruce Springsteen
For the life of me, I can’t see why anyone under the age of, say, 55 would want to listen to Bruce Springsteen, never mind revere him as a deep and important artist, or pay upward of $200 to be crammed into a football stadium to attend one of his concerts. Surely the only pertinent...
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The School of History
“We feel bound to disagree with these prophets of doom.” —John XXIII Nestled in the foothills below Saddleback Mountain in “the O.C.” there is an abbey of priests and a small boarding school. There is nothing there that would remind one of the lubricious television program that made the initials of Orange County, California, proverbial;...
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Reporting and Deciding
The Hurt Locker Produced by First Light Production and Kingsgate Films Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Screenplay by Mark Boal Distributed by Summit Entertainment At last we have a movie that makes us feel the full obscenity of the Iraq war. Other films have been well intentioned but have either given in to the temptation...
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An American Prophet
“A prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” —Mark 4:4 A half-dozen biographical essays or theses have now been written on George Kennan, including John Lukacs’s recent and compelling George Kennan: A Study of Character (2007). This latest endeavor, by Lee Congdon, is...
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I Remember
For some years I have lived in Québec as a friendly alien from the United States, traveling from time to time back to my native Minnesota and other states to practice law in my fields of interest. I am married to a French-Canadian wife who is a member of the bar and mairesse of our...
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History and Nature
Thanks for your response. I enjoyed it immensely, and I believe you will understand that this is debate as it should be, not the invective that often substitutes for intellectual vibrancy these sad days. One of the pitfalls of this point in history is that everything ends up reduced to discussions of “slavery.” One single...
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Banking on Fraud
The insight at the core of the conservative disposition—that the future is invariably worse than the past—enjoys daily confirmation as the economic crisis deepens. It seems that in many respects we have entered a new world, which, given the circumstances of its birth, is sure to be rather grim. We got a good glimpse at...
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The Quiet Apostasy of Québec
The Canadian province of Québec is the only French-speaking region in North America where the official language is still French. It is spoken by more than 80 percent of the population. Québec is the last living bastion of the French North American Empire founded in the 17th century. It was the realization of Catholic and...
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Deconstructing Miss Dixie
College-football season has begun again in the South. Here in Alabama, football is more like a religion than a sport. Having both attended and taught at The University of Alabama from the 1970’s through the 1990’s, I was at ground zero of college-football fanaticism, and I must confess that I still like the excitement. But...
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Men in Power
In March, Steve Saltarelli, a junior Law, Letters, and Society major at the University of Chicago, wrote a satirical article for the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, entitled “Men in Power.” The subtitle read, “True equality means groups that advocate for men as well as women.” In the article, Saltarelli jokingly proposed founding an advocacy...
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Doubts About the Law
“Rawhide” Andrews was a Texas Ranger. He came to the force after it was reconstituted in 1874, the Rangers having been discredited in the years following the War of Yankee Aggression as an enforcement unit for carpetbaggers. Comanches were in decline from smallpox and cholera and from the near extinction of buffalo by hide hunters. ...
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They Got Away With It
Nearing the third anniversary of their crime, the remaining members of the Jena Six at long last admitted what anyone with any sense knew: They are guilty as charged. The leader of the pack, Mychal Bell, had already confessed to second-degree battery on December 4, 2007, one year to the day after the attack, and...
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The Noble Savage
A sequel to Dances With Wolves is reportedly scheduled for release in 2011. Not only did Dances create a romantic American Indian who never existed, it reversed the roles of the Sioux and the Pawnee. This kind of thing has been going on for hundreds of years, beginning with various European writers who, far removed...
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Manufacturing Our Future
Last month, I discussed what the future of manufacturing in the United States will have to be, if manufacturing in the United States is to have a future; this month, I can say with some certainty that I have seen the future of manufacturing, and it is here in Rockford. Before you laugh and turn...
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Of Gentlemen Sportsmen
By the time you read this the U.S. Open will be in full cry. Tough, unsmiling professionals will be hitting balls back and forth with machine-like regularity, and Cyclops, the mechanical eye that overrides human decisions, will be resolving close matches. It is Aldous Huxley come true, with a little Orwell thrown in for good...
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Stepping Backward
When Jefferson Davis was a boy, he told his father that he did not wish to go to school. The Yankee schoolmaster, although a kindly man, demanded a great deal of memory work and threatened to punish young Jeff for his failure. His father took the declaration in stride and calmly explained to his son,...
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Wallow in the Mire
One of the less appreciated perils of literary fame is the risk a writer runs every hundred years as the anniversary of his birthday approaches. This year marks the 200th birthday not only of Darwin but of Lincoln, a completely irrelevant coincidence that inspired Smithsonian—the trivializing newsletter of “the nation’s attic”—to celebrate the two men...
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Educating for Faith and Community
Few realize that the largest Protestant school system in the United States is operated by the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. With 1,018 elementary schools and 102 high schools sharing a combined enrollment of 149,201 students, it is an impressive educational endeavor. Beyond the United States, Lutheran schools in Canada, South America, Africa, Australia, and even such...
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Obama Goes to Moscow
President Obama’s July trip to Moscow was intended to “reset” U.S.-Russian relations but also suggested that there is a continuing tug-of-war in the administration between realists and “democracy builders” regarding Russia policy. The struggle was publicly kicked off by the March report of a commission headed by former Sen. Gary Hart and Sen. Chuck Hagel...
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The Gamblers’ Club
On July 15 Goldman Sachs reported that its second-quarter profits were the highest in 140 years. It netted $3.4 billion on $13.4 billion in revenue (78 percent of which came from trading and principal investments and 11 percent from investment banking). Exactly which trades brought in such large profits is said to be proprietary. It...
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Did Hitler Want War?
On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war. Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known ...
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That Kennedy Legacy
The end of Ted Kennedy’s long sojourn among us, splendidly splashed by the media, opened the renewed discussion of whether it’s time that big government, in the Kennedy mode, came back. The late senator’s eulogists—in politics and the media, not to mention at the funeral—tended to nod their heads enthusiastically. We needed the big ideas...
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From Citizen to Serf in 200 Years
America is a strange place. Liberals get emotionally distraught that the Founding Fathers stuck Second Amendment rights in the Constitution. For American citizens to possess firearms is considered to be dangerous. Yet, it is quite all right for Americans to possess deadly green mambas. Mambas are large, fast and very poisonous African snakes whose bite...
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The Right Wing’s Prince of Gonzo
The “Prince of Darkness”—aka Robert Novak—who died this week of a brain tumor, was the Hunter Thompson of the right, albeit with predictable differences. Thompson, like Rimbaud, espoused a total disordering of all the senses—with materials as varied as ayahuasca, LSD, cocaine and tequila whereas Novak stuck to booze. Thompson blew his brains out, whereas...
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Ted Kennedy: Lion of Liberalism or Lyin’ Liberal?
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Closed Societies, Open Minds—September 2009
PERSPECTIVE Stepping Backwardby Thomas Fleming VIEWS Deconstructing Miss Dixieby Michael HillEducating for the planetary community. Educating for Faith and Communityby Thomas J. KorcokA Lutheran success story. The School of Historyby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.California, here we come! NEWS Berlusconi’s Will To Fightby Alberto CarosaBetter late than never. REVIEWS An American Prophetby George W. Liebmann Lee Congdon:...
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Fatal Flaw of Democracies
“We just can’t afford it!” Not long ago, every America child heard that, at one time or another, in the home in which he or she was raised. “We just can’t afford it!” It may have been a new car, or two weeks at the beach, or the new flat-panel TV screen. Every family knew...
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Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs
“In a little time [there will be] no middling sort. We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars.”—R.L. Bushman “Rapidly you are dividing into two classes—extreme rich and extreme poor.”—”Brutus” Americans think that they have “freedom and democracy” and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The...
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Love And The Ruins
What with baby boomers running our instruments of communication, what were we going to talk about this month but, yes, the 40th anniversary of Woodstock? Lay it on me, man! Peace! Love! All that ’60s stuff! Or some of it. The marginality of Woodstock as a Great American Event will grow more obvious as—I hate...
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Orestes II
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Our National Pastime?
Recently at NRO, Mark Krikorian drew critical attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal which described how minor league baseball teams are now importing foreign players. According to the Journal, “For decades, minor-league rosters seemed the essence of the American heartland. But thanks to growing numbers of foreign players . . . the...
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Progressive Illusions
White America is never more vividly and comically racist than when trying to excuse impromptu racist utterance or deny the racism of American society, which is manifest in every number, every graph and scatter plot in the annual Statistical Abstract of the United States. It was a former governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, regarded as...
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Unwinnable War?
“Taliban Are Winning: U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Warns of Rising Casualties.” Thus ran the startling headline on the front-page of the Wall Street Journal. The lead paragraph ran thus: “The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict...