So here, as if on cue, it being a new day and all, came the Obama administration Monday to announce new arrangements for the way the country does business. The new big idea: Tell all those banks how much they’re going to be allowed to pay executives; let them know the gravy train leaves the...
Year: 2009
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Your Future as a Terrorist
The Homeland Security apparatus has garnered quite a bit of attention lately for a paper that identified anti-abortionists, anti-immigrationists, and war veterans as terrorist suspects. (I thought “profiling” was forbidden, but in that matter, as so often these days, it would seem that some people are more equal than others.) Some Republican politicians are playing...
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Breaking Bibi
“I have to admire the residents of Iroquois territory for assuming that they have a right to determine where Jews lives in Jerusalem.” Thus did Israeli government press director Daniel Seamen caustically dismiss President Obama’s opposition to Israel’s right to “natural growth” of its settlements in Arab East Jerusalem and on the West Bank. Though...
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Illiteracy in High Places
If a person lives long enough, he can watch everyone forget everything they learned. Everyone includes Federal Reserve chairmen, economists, Bank of America “strategists” and even Bloomberg.com. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks he can hold down U.S. long-term interest rates by purchasing mortgage bonds and U.S. Treasuries. Sixty years ago, the Federal Reserve understood...
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Sotomayor and the Last of the WASPS
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court will consist of six Catholics, two Jews and precisely one white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the form of Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 89 years old and boasts of two important WASP insignia: inherited wealth and a bow tie. He also thinks that Shakespeare’s plays...
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All Local, All the Time
One of the talk-radio stations here in Rockford bills itself as “All Local. All Day.” It is an interesting slogan, in light of increasing reports of the impending failure of local media; it would be even more interesting if it (or a version of it) were not used by hundreds of other talk-radio stations across...
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If You Are Stressed Now, Just Wait
Economic news remains focused on banks and housing, while the threat mounts to the U.S. dollar from massive federal budget deficits in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. Earlier this year, the dollar’s exchange value rose against currencies, such as the euro, the British pound and Swiss franc, against which the dollar had been steadily falling....
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Bailing Out the Bucket Shops
Since September 2008 an awful lot of Americans have lost 40 to 50 percent of their net worth. According to Bloomberg News, the federal government, during the same period, has committed $11.3 trillion in loans, guarantees, and investments to bail out the financial system. The Obama administration believes this effort will help the overall economy...
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What is History? Part 35
You can do anything you like in London as long as you don’t do it in the street and don’t frighten the horses. —Mrs. Patrick Campbell There is nothing so stupid as a gallant British officer. —Wellington I am one Southerner who is not obsessed with the Civil War. I am too busy planning for...
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A Quota Queen for the Court
If the U.S. Senate rejects race-based justice, Sonia Sotomayor will never sit on the Supreme Court. Because that is what Sonia is all about. As the New York Times reported Saturday, the salient cause of her career has been advancing persons of color, over whites, based on race and national origin. “Judge Sotomayor, whose parents...
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The Right Fork
The chronological niche which the generation of D.J. Taylor’s title occupies, 1918-40, will be remembered by future historians—if, indeed, there should be any such creatures among the oafish homunculi now incubating in the totalitarian crucibles of modern life—for sheltering the end product of the West’s millennial evolution. Good or bad, foolish or clever, talented or...
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Modern Dress
The proverbial visitor from Mars—or perhaps I should say Neptune, since the only intelligent life known to exist on Mars today is robotic, crawling in and out of craters as it frenziedly snaps digital photographs like an ordinary terrestrial tourist—anyhow, the proverbial visitor from outer space would never guess from visiting Earth’s Western and Westernizing...
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Errol Flynn
Errol Leslie Flynn was an unlikely icon—thin lipped, beady eyed, and blessed with a mild case of rhinophyma (big-nose syndrome), much exacerbated by booze and age, not to mention an (at one time) impenetrably thick Australian accent. On meeting the young Flynn, other children would take one look at him and burst into tears. Despite...
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Never Paranoid Enough
“Trust no one.” The landmark TV series The X-Files used that catchphrase in depicting a world riven with conspiracies that reach to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agents who attempted to unravel these grand conspiracies, make the occasional appearance in Kathryn Olmsted’s Real Enemies. Man...
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Pretenders
Revolutionary Road Produced and distributed by Dreamworks and BBC Films Directed by Sam Mendes Screenplay by Justin Haythe from Richard Yates’ novel The Lemon Tree Produced by Eran Riklis Productions and Heimatfilm Directed by Eran Riklis Screenplay by Suha Arraf Distributed by IFC Films British director Sam Mendes has turned Richard Yates’ 1961 novel,...
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California Crash
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-a, wipeout.” —The Surfaris Maybe we just had it too great out here in California. Perfect weather. World-class universities. High-paying middle-class jobs. Reasonably priced housing. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The Beach Boys. California girls. Hollywood. Disneyland. Now the state is crumbling fast into the ocean. Still can’t beat the weather—until unemployment forces you to move to...
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The Reduction of Certainty
One should begin a review with a summation of a book and then of its author. The reverse is warranted in this case. James Grant is an extraordinary American, a financial expert whose mind is enriched by his knowledge of history. His previous book was an excellent biography of John Adams. It did not receive...
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Deal With the Devil
For several months after last November, the American media raved about Barack Obama’s achievement in becoming the first African-American president of the United States. I didn’t—and couldn’t—join in the jubilation, for several reasons. First, it had always seemed to me obvious that we would have a black president someday. When I was in junior-high school...
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Look Who’s Talking
“This conversation doesn’t exist.” Those were the last words spoken by U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) as she concluded her 2005 chat with “a suspected Israeli agent,” as Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly put it, during the course of which she agreed to sell her country down the river in exchange for 30 pieces of...
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The Economic Impact of Immigration
I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago. My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly not for our reasons—and also...
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The End of the Chain
The global decline of fertility rates may well be the single most important trend in the contemporary world, a phenomenon that will transform our societies into something radically different from anything in recent history. The worldwide birth strike will cause upheaval in the ethnic and social structure of familiar nations and will echo through financial...
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Illegal—Alien Shutdown
The bigger the infestation, an exterminator will tell you, the harder the pest is to eliminate. Thus it is with illegal aliens, and one recent event illustrates that the infestation is so pervasive, it may be well-nigh impossible to stop. That event was a speech at the University of North Carolina in early April by...
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You Should Have Been Here Yesteryear
California was imagined and named before it was discovered. In 1510 in Seville there appeared a novel that would have Fabio on the cover today. Written by Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo, Las sergas de Esplandián is a romance of chivalry that vividly describes the adventures of a fictitious Christian knight, Esplandián. In defending Constantinople against...
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All Local, All the Time
One of the talk-radio stations here in Rockford bills itself as “All Local. All Day.” It is an interesting slogan, in light of increasing reports of the impending failure of local media; it would be even more interesting if it (or a version of it) were not used by hundreds of other talk-radio stations across...
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Up From Knavery
I recently attended a jujitsu tournament in Newark, New Jersey, a 15-minute train ride from New York City. I had been to the Newark airport before but never entered the town. It was quite a revelation. I walked up the main thoroughfare, named after Martin Luther King, Jr., and saw only black people. The solitary...
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Immigration, Neighbors, and Enemies
It is like a science-fiction movie from the 1950’s. Mysterious radiation from outer space takes over the brains of Asian men in America, turning them into moral zombies that go on killing sprees: a Buddhist in Texas who tried to beat the demons out of his three-year-old son who had eaten meat; a discharged IBM...
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I’m Sorry You’re a Terrorist
It’s 9 a.m. Do you know where your government is? An April 7 report issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security caused a stir among veterans and pro-life activists. It was published to alert state and local law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials that the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis Assessment has suggested that right-wing...
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The Empire Is Naked
“All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.” —Karl Marx After the Last Man is a short and dense book, consisting of a series of vignettes (excursus) ranging from a paragraph to a few pages in length on the contemporary technological system. Each excursus is...
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Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton, R.I.P.
When Popcorn Sutton died in mid-March at the age of 62, the national press ran obituaries. Though he was just an old moonshiner who’d plied his trade for half a century and done nothing else of consequence, a whole bunch of folks in Tennessee and North Carolina grieved more than they would have over the...
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Forgotten French
Last October, the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to French novelist J.M.G. Le Clézio, the 13th French writer to win since the award’s inauguration in 1901 and the first to win since avant-garde novelist Claude Simon in 1985. Some of the earlier French winners, such as Albert Camus, André Gide, and Jean-Paul Sartre...
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Change is in the Air
Gov. Rick Perry was a star at the Texas “tea parties,” denouncing Washington and mentioning the s-word—secession—in front of enthusiastic crowds. Perry had already made headlines by calling for Texas to reject Washington’s “stimulus” funds and by backing a resolution in the Texas House of Representatives affirming the state’s sovereignty, before he fired up the...
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Bailing Out the Bucket Shops
Since September 2008 an awful lot of Americans have lost 40 to 50 percent of their net worth. According to Bloomberg News, the federal government, during the same period, has committed $11.3 trillion in loans, guarantees, and investments to bail out the financial system. The Obama administration believes this effort will help the overall economy...
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On Serbophobia
One reference in Scott P. Richert’s article on Rod Blagojevich (“Meet Rod Blago,” The Rockford Files, April) to the disgraced governor’s Serbian origins would have sufficed to inform Chronicles readers of a somewhat relevant detail. Two such reminders would have been superfluous. Three or more amount to making a point, however, of the kind unworthy...
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Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton, R.I.P.
When Popcorn Sutton died in mid-March at the age of 62, the national press ran obituaries. Though he was just an old moonshiner who’d plied his trade for half a century and done nothing else of consequence, a whole bunch of folks in Tennessee and North Carolina grieved more than they would have over the...
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The Cost of Immigration—June 2009
PERSPECTIVE Immigration, Neighbors, and Enemiesby Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Economic Impact of Immigration by Peter BrimelowPaying for the Privilege. You Should Have Been Here Yesteryearby Roger D. McGrathWhen the Golden State was paradise. California Crashby John C. Seiler, Jr.The Golden State today. Mandating Failure by Edwin S. RubensteinFederal insistence on multilingualism. NEWS Bailing Out the Bucket...
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Obama’s Idea of Justice
When you think about it, Sonia Sotomayor is the perfect pick for the Supreme Court—in Barack Obama’s America. Like Obama, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action, she thinks “Latina women,” because of their life experience, make better judicial decisions than white men, that discrimination against white men to advance people of color is what America...
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Succumbing to the Dark Side
Torture is a violation of U.S. and international law. Yet, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, on the basis of legally incompetent memos prepared by Justice Department officials, gave the OK to interrogators to violate U.S. and international law. The new Obama administration shows no inclination to uphold ...
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What is History? Part 34
Never trust a man who reads only one book. —Arturo Perez-Reverte . . . the monarchy had become an insatiable machine for devouring taxes, while a drained populace received nothing in exchange but the political blunders and the disasters of war. —Perez-Reverte In a sense the American Civil War is a belated chapter of the...
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Rare as the Proverbial Hen’s Tooth
A utility corporation that requests a DECREASE in rates Local government that REDUCES property taxes Airport screeners searching someone who actually might be a terrorist. Airport screeners not searching blonde, blue-eyed young women. A government program that requests a decrease in funding. A government poverty program that actually helps anyone who deserves help. An honest...
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The Way We Are, No. 5
Your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference; that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without and your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered ...
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What is History? Part 33
I was born and raised in the North. I didn’t like their Yankee culture when I was there, and I like it even less the more time I spend in the South. —Al Benson, Copperhead Chronicles There is such a thing as imperial fatigue, and servitude seems a light burden after the exhausting weight of...
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What Is History? Part 32
Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?Who gave it forth that gardens should be bone-yards?Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and brains?Who made the Law?—British Sgt. Frederick Coulson, killed on the Western Front, Oct. 7, 1916 The instinct for Power is...
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Beware the Hate Crime Bill’s Unintended Consequences
A statute’s words do not tell how the law will be interpreted and applied. All laws are expansively interpreted. For example: —The Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was directed at drug lords. Nothing in the law says anything about divorce, yet it soon was applied in divorce cases. —The 1964 Civil Rights Act explicitly...
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This, Too, Shall Pass
I’ve lately been promoting a book I wrote on the plight of the mainline Christian denominations, featuring the Episcopal Church as Exhibit A in the Trainwreck Chronicles. An interviewer asked me: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of these churches? I replied: I’m too old to be pessimistic. A blog commenter ventured that...
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Wanted: A Fighting Party
As was evident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, it is deja vu, 1961, all over again. We have a young, cool, witty, personable president—and an adoring press corps. “I am Barack Obama,” the president introduced himself. “Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox...
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Nations of Immigrants
The irrepressible Silvio Berlusconi is in hot water again with all left-thinking people, this time for his remarks on illegal immigrants. After praising Libya for taking back 500 illegals from Italy, the Italian PM observed,
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The Economic Impact of Immigration: Paying for the Privilege
I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago. My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly ...