The Rockford Institute’s 12th Annual Summer School, “The American West,” is under way at Chronicles headquarters in Rockford, Illinois. The first lecture, delivered on Tuesday evening, July 7, was by Thomas Fleming: “Print the Legend: Clantons Versus Earps in Myth, History, and Film.” Here is a portion of Dr. Fleming’s talk, in which he addresses...
Year: 2009
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Dumbing-Down the U.S. Navy
“Naval Academy Professor Challenges Rising Diversity,” ran the headline in the Washington Post. The impression left was that some sorehead was griping because black and Hispanic kids were finally being admitted. The Post‘s opening paragraphs reinforced the impression. “Of the 1,230 plebes who took the oath of office at the Naval Academy in Annapolis this...
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Hands Off Honduras!
Last Saturday, Honduran soldiers marched into the presidential palace, bundled up President Manuel Zelaya and put him on a plane for Costa Rica. The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another...
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Pirates of the Mediterranean
On June 30, the government of Israel committed an act of piracy when the Israeli Navy in international waters illegally boarded the Spirit of Humanity, kidnapped its 21-person crew from 11 countries, including former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire, and confiscated the cargo of medical ...
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Credo for Conservatives Part III: Order, Tradition, and Loyalty
III. A social order, being a natural expression of human sociability, should not be undermined, overturned, or rejected on frivolous grounds. A. Man is not a purely natural creature and he never lived in a state of nature. Thus, since there is no such things as universal human rights ...
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Breast Implants and Barbarians
When Miss California’s assets were revealed to be fakies, I immediately thought of a line from Roland Bainton’s excellent and concise history The Medieval Church: “The real point,” he wrote, “was . . . ” Well, first, the story. Way back on April 19, during the Miss USA pageant, California’s Carrie Prejean was flying high. ...
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Revision in Deadpan
Charles Glass, who lives in London, is an old friend of mine. He is, moreover, a member of White’s; a witty conversationalist; an American with impeccable manners; immaculate, if slightly Brooks Brothers conservative, in his dress; and almost universally liked. Hence the fact that he has published, to near unanimous critical acclaim in Britain, a...
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Of Queens, Democrats, and History
“I am told thee has been dancing with the queen. I do hope, my son, thee will not marry out of meeting.” —American Quaker mother in a letter to her son following the Coronation Ball in 1838 Here are three very excellent books, two on the subject of America, the third substantially so. One of the...
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Real Causes
Ask any trendy student of history today and he will tell you that, without question, the cause of the great American bloodletting of 1861–65 was slavery. Slavery and nothing but slavery. The unstated and usually unconscious assumption is that only people warped by a vicious institution could possibly fight against being part of “the greatest...
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A Living Past
It is a small town in Bavaria, and it is at least 32 degrees C. The camera weighs heavy in my hands, and I can feel speckles of sweat accumulating beneath my black rucksack, as it soaks up the sun like a square and sinister sponge. All around us are people similarly suffering, but good-tempered...
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Fr. Stanley Jaki, R.I.P.
When the 18-year-old Stanley Jaki entered the archabbey of Pannonhalma in western Hungary to become a monk, he would have seen over the great entrance to the conventual complex an image that still may be seen there today, a summary of the “enlightened” Viennese policy for regular clergy: On one side, King St. Stephen of...
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Geez
Angels & Demons Produced by Columbia Pictures Directed by Ron Howard Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp from the novel by Dan Brown Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing For those who care, I’ve given away the ending of Angels & Demons in the review that follows. Those irrepressible schlockmeisters Ron Howard and Akiva...
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The Distributist Alternative: A Voluntary Safety Net
As an economic concept, distributism refers to a broad, voluntary distribution of wealth in land, labor, and capital. The idea has its origins in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum novarum, which rejected Marxism and capitalism’s laissez-faire variant, and in the works of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Belloc’s Servile State (1912) recognizes that...
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Once More With Feeling
This volume has provoked in this correspondent a number of Yogi Berra moments—it’s been déjà vu all over again, and for more than one reason. Why, then, am I seized with such a pleasant vertigo? Let me count the ways! First off, I have lived with this material before some of it even happened, for...
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Lincoln, the Antiwar Congressman
The only time before his presidency when Abraham Lincoln held national office was a single term (1847-49) in the U.S. House of Representatives. During that time, while debating the Mexican-American War, Lincoln zealously defended the constitutional prerogative of Congress to declare war and enact legislation against a perceived usurpation of these powers by the executive...
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Israeli Spies, Exposed: Only the Beginning
It was a sizzling June afternoon in 2003 when the Pentagon’s top Iran analyst, Lawrence Franklin, walked in off the hot pavement into the cool recesses of the Tivoli restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, and offered to commit espionage against the United States—and the FBI recorded every word. It wasn’t just serendipity that caught this traitor...
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Cheney Logorrhea
Pat Buchanan is one of our favorite people and is certainly a source of inspiration for many of our readers. However, in a recent column entitled “Obama Avoids the Crocodile,” he defends Barack Obama’s decision not to release the horrendous Abu Ghraib photos (some of which show rapes of prisoners by American and Iraqi soldiers)...
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Aids, Condoms, and Liberals
Since I’ve just finished reading a two-page spread in the Wall Street Journal on sexual assault among staff at the United Nations, I hesitate to refer to a U.N. report in support of what I am about to say on sexual incontinence and AIDS. Still, here it is, as quoted by Edward C. Green, a...
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki
I recently saw a video clip of a television talk-show host calling President Truman a war criminal for authorizing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have heard others make similar comments. During the late 1960’s it became almost de rigueur on college campuses for professors to argue that the bombs were unnecessary, that...
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Of Sycophants and Soliloquies
For those of us here in Rockford, Illinois, 200 miles (give or take) northwest of South Bend, Indiana, President Barack Obama’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame on May 17 provoked a sense of déjà vu. For it was on that same date six years ago that another commencement address on a controversial...
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Boozing With Papa
Fifty-four years ago this month, dizzy with happiness at having been freed from the jail that was boarding school, I ventured down New York’s 5th Avenue looking for fun and adventure. I knew a place called El Borracho, Spanish for “the drunkard,” where my parents used to dine. The owner was an agreeable Catalan who...
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The Good Life
“Say, I guess America is just about the best country that has ever existed in the history of mankind.” I have been hearing this assertion all my life and never fully understood what is intended, unless it is merely one of those ahems that we Americans inject into a conversation when we have nothing to...
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To the Future, and Beyond!
“The Amazing Kreskin” used to keep late-night television audiences in stitches with his fearless predictions of the absurd future. He always began with the windy declaration, “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” With all due respect for a...
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Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost
Andrew Lytle’s “The Hind Tit” is the best essay in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), not only because it focuses on the small, independent farmer, the class the Agrarians most admired, but also because Lytle nails the volume’s primary thesis to the church door, the dilemma his region and nation faced in 1930—the choice between...
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A Winning Stragey
Michael Steele appears to be a pleasant enough fellow. But he is off to a rocky start as chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). Within weeks of his election, Steele gave an interview to GQ in which he was quoted as saying that abortion is an “individual choice,” the refrain generally used by “abortion-rights”...
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What “Terrible Lesson” Can Russia Teach Us?
“We are exceptional people; we are among those nations that . . . exist only to give the world some terrible lesson.” —Pyotr Chaadayev Chaadayev’s words came to mind in the aftermath of a blizzard in Vladivostok, snowy peaks ringing the port city, the sky still obscured by thick clouds. It was November 1992. The...
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On Reversing Course
In “Now He Knows the Rest of the Story” (Rockford Files, May), Scott P. Richert wrote that Paul Harvey “reversed course on the Vietnam War” in 1970, having previously been a supporter. I remember distinctly that he made this decision as he drove his son to Canada to avoid the draft. But I am sure...
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Worth Repeating
When the U.S. Post Office banned Fr. Charles E. Coughlin’s Social Justice from the mail in April 1942, ending its six-year run, it put the hopes, beliefs, and opinions of nearly half, perhaps more, of Americans into the dustbin of history, along with some useful facts we could use now as we move into the...
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Gun Control: What Is the Agenda?
Some years or decades ago, I researched and reported on the Sullivan Act, one of America's first gun-control laws. New York state Sen. Timothy Sullivan, a corrupt Tammany Hall politician, represented New York's Red Hook district. Commercial travelers passing through the district would be relieved of their valuables by ...
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Lincoln, the Antiwar Congressman
The only time before his presidency when Abraham Lincoln held national office was a single term (1847-49) in the U.S. House of Representatives. During that time, while debating the Mexican-American War, Lincoln zealously defended the constitutional prerogative of Congress to declare war and enact legislation against a perceived usurpation of ...
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Who’s Laughing Now?
There was symmetry in the news that barraged us one day last week—Michael Jackson, not to mention Farrah Fawcett, had died, and the governor of South Carolina had made a nitwit and a creep out of himself over a woman in Argentina. Politics, entertainment—you can’t tell where one leaves off and the other takes up....
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Surviving the Next Depression—July 2009
PERSPECTIVE The Good Life by Thomas Fleming VIEWS Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost by Tom Landess Or did they? What
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What is History? Part 38
A meddling Yankee is God’s worst creation; he cannot run his own affairs correctly, but is constantly interfering in the affairs of others, and he is always ready to repent of everyone’s sin, but his own. —North Carolina newspaper, 1854 Powerful ornary stock, George, powerful ornary. —”Sut Lovingood” on the Puritan Yankee If a person lives...
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California, Here We Come!
PALM SPRINGS, Calif.—In just a few weeks time, California hits the wall. And Americans should take a good, long look at the fiscal and social wreck of the Golden Land, because California is at a place to which all of America is heading. In May, when five fund-raising proposals were put on the ballot, Gov....
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What is History? Part 37
It is said, and it is very true, that the moment when vice becomes the custom marks the death of a republic, for the dissolute persons cease to be regarded as loathsome, and all baseness becomes normal. —Arturo Perez-Reverte “Hell” ain’t cussin’, it’s geography. —Harry Carey, Jr. in Wagon Master History has the cruel reality of...
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The Way We Are, No. 10
According to the Constitution, Congress must declare war. However, the President is authorized to initiate an Overseas Contingency Operation whenever he chooses. It is said that a man is just as good as his word. That tells us everything we need to know about our politicians. An establishment “conservative” complains that Obama is “the first...
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Jim Webb’s Attack on the American Gulag
On June 11, Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia introduced his bill to set up a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission. “We find ourselves as a nation,” Webb declared, “in the midst of a profound, deeply corrosive crisis,” vis., “the national disgrace of our present criminal justice system” and “the disintegration of this system, day by...
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Iran Faces Greater Risks Than It Knows
Stephen Kinzer's book, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, tells the story of the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected leader, Muhammad Mosaddeq, by the CIA and the British MI6 in 1953. The CIA bribed Iranian government officials, businessmen and reporters, and paid ...
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Tiananmen Moments
On Dec. 14, 1825, following the death of Alexander I—who had seen off Napoleon—his brother, the grand duke, who had just taken the oath as Czar Nicholas I, was confronted by mutinous troops and rebels in Senate Square before the Winter Palace. For hours, the czar stood at the end of ...
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Democratic “Brain Surgery”
It’s only money, we like to say, when we know we shouldn’t be pulling out our wallets, but … The ‘but’ is a big one when it comes to health care reform: huge, immense, Himalayan. So big we’re not going to do it, I’ll bet you money. Not this year we’re not, because we’ve barely...
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Are You Ready for War With Demonized Iran?
How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan ...
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Tiller, Roeder, Richert, and Luther
. . . We interrupt this broadcast to celebrate(!) a Lutheran-Catholic lovefest . . . Recently, there has been a blogosphere brouhaha over questions pertaining to the murder of late-term abortionist scoundrel George Tiller. Our executive editor Scott P. Richert has made compelling arguments against Tiller’s murder at his Catholicism GuideSite on About.com. And yet...
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High Words, Low Realities
“Among some Muslims,” Obama declared in Cairo, “there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld … Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together.” This came at the end of a week in which the...
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Miss Affirmative Action, 2009
Having lost the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, Republicans are looking to redefine themselves for a nation that still leans conservative but is less Republican that it has been in decades. The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court presents just such an opportunity. For, even if the...
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The Way We Are, No. 9
Have we no shame? (No.) —Fred Reed Stimulus: $250 each for Social Security recipients; $250,000,000(?) each for bankers and stock speculators. Sounds like business as usual. With affirmative action and bailouts, the U.S. government has almost succeeded in severing the link between performance and reward. Honest Abe. Fair and Balanced. Compassionate Conservatism. Notice a pattern...
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What Is History? Part 36
What are people for? —Wendell Berry We shouldn’t care a bit who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Who musters a majority on Capitol Hill (it is, after all, merely a “hill”), nor who warms the benches of the Supreme Court. If we concern ourselves with what happens in Washington, we give credence to their fatuous claim...
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Fear Rules
The power of irrational fear in the United States is extraordinary. It ranks up there with the Israel lobby, the military-security complex and the financial gangsters. Indeed, fear might be the most powerful force in America. Americans are at ease with their country’s aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, which has resulted in a million...