It’s always nice to have one’s beliefs confirmed. I was traveling this week, and wasn’t able to follow current events closely, but as the bad news around Toyota continued to mount, I figured that someone at NRO would be flacking for the Japanese and suggesting that it was all part of a government plot to...
Year: 2010
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Bring Our Marines Home
A month after Germany surrendered in May 1945, America's eyes turned to the Far East, where the bloodiest battle of the Pacific war was joined on the island of Okinawa. Twelve thousand U.S. soldiers and Marines would die—twice as many dead in 82 days of fighting as have died in all ...
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Government Itself Needs an Education
Anyone who sees health policy as a trackless jungle for policymakers should take a gander at education policy as mediated by the federal government. Anyone who thinks U.S. public schools are better overall than when the federal government muscled its way into a policy jurisdiction reserved generally to the states—careful about jostling sleepwalkers. Oh, well,...
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Greek Diary II
The Plaka was once the heart of modern Athens, first Ottoman Athens and then the Athens built largely by German kings and queens and their philhellenic architects. It was ruined by the work of brilliant American archaeologists who tore out the heart of the neighborhood in digging up the ...
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Bonkers in Space
Tarkovsky’s Solaris came out in 1972, which was the year I’d left Russia. It was not until a quarter of a century later that I watched the long and quaint film, and was strangely affected by it. I had always thought that nothing on the screen, if it was any good at all, could not...
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Three Cities, Three Empires
Stendahl begins his peculiar autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard, with his alter ego standing at the summit of the Janiculum Hill, surveying the city of Rome, west to east. It is October 16, 1832, and Brulard faces his cinquantaine in three months. Fifty years, he thinks! But Raphael’s Transfiguration has been admired for 250...
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Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent, is not happy with the current state of American civilization, a view he makes crystal clear in Empire of Illusion. Hedges is an independent man of the left and a cultural conservative. Chronicles readers may recall the controversy over his commencement address in 2003 at Rockford...
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Of Genes, Vowels, and Violence
Why do the British speak English and not a variety of Welsh? Philip Jenkins, having fallen under the sway of a Harvard medieval historian, Michael McCormick, believes it is because the invading Germans of the fifth and sixth centuries killed all the Celtic-speaking male Britons in what is now England. (See “Once There Was a...
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On Dueling, Divorce, and Red Indians
In February 1861, Joseph Sadoc Alemany, the first Roman Catholic bishop of the state of California, wrote an urgent pastoral letter to his flock. This letter was published immediately in the New York Freeman’s Journal, and for this indiscretion its editor was imprisoned for a year in Fort Lafayette, and his presses were shut down. ...
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In Flight
Up in the Air Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Sheldon Turner, adapting Walter Kirn’s novel The Road Produced and distributed by Dimension Films Directed by John Hillcoat Screenplay by Joe Penhall, adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel George Clooney, well-groomed and exceedingly fit at 49, seems perfect as Ryan Bingham,...
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Populist Reveries
Mr. Greider is a hopeful man. Although he believes the United States is in deep trouble, “deeper than many people suppose and the authorities want to acknowledge,” he also believes the country is on the cusp of a second populist uprising, which will force elites to confront the perils of globalism, militarism, economic inequality, ecological...
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A Huge and Healthy Pessimism
In his splendidly sardonic Devil’s Dictionary, that old gringo Ambrose Bierce defines pessimism as “a philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile.” Bierce would have smiled—or, rather, frowned—kindly upon John Derbyshire’s new book, an often droll demolition of the...
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Little Bitty Pretty One
The television screen shows five-year-old Tara being awakened from a sound sleep at 6 a.m. She has a beauty pageant to get ready for. To shake off her sluggishness she is given a carb-rich donut and some caffeine-loaded Mountain Dew. After “breakfast” Tara is dressed in a two-piece bathing suit and taken to a makeshift...
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Remaking Conservatism
Charles Kesler, in an otherwise unremarkable essay in the Claremont Review of Books (Summer 2009), argues that an effective response to the challenges of modern liberalism requires a revolution within conservatism. He says a reformation on the right must involve a “return to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution” as interpreted by...
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Going Green for Goldman
What’s behind the cult of “global warming”? We’ve been hearing about it for years on television, in magazines, from politicians, and from certain corporate entities: Mankind is destroying the earth, and the only solution is to “go green.” Unless we radically change our behavior, the oceans will rise, catastrophe will ensue, and that will be...
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Cicero’s Legacy
Once a believer in the blessings of modernity and classical liberalism, Dutch philosopher Andreas Kinneging now considers himself a “convert” to traditional thinking. He believes that the Enlightenment and Romanticism have brought “decline and deterioration, instead of progress and improvement.” Today, public discourse, directed by shallow pragmatists, reveals an historically illiterate ruling class. “Because we...
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The Lord’s Shepard
We had known it was a “white road” when we had found it on the map, but when my wife and I got to the start of it, we hesitated. There was a sign at the junction, and it made us stop and think: RD 103 EN LACUNE CIRCULATION DANGEREUSE ET DÉCONSEILLÉE. En lacune wasn’t...
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Mommy’s Eco-Scold
The scene opens with children at a playground, laughing and yelling as they swing and jump rope. The camera zooms in on a dark-haired little girl, seven or eight years old, running her finger through a dirty puddle. Suddenly, thunder tears through the sky, and a downpour sends the children screaming home. Later that night,...
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Greece on the Skids
The economic crisis is on the minds of everyone in Greece, and James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid” is on the lips of many Greek politicians. The Hellenic economy is collapsing, and the huge and counterproductive public sector has failed to generate growth, produce wealth, and diffuse it to the people. The major European papers...
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An Inconvenient History
Over the past decade, climate change has been a permanent fixture in the headlines, and its implications are frightening. Depending on whom you believe, the earth might be on the verge of a warming trend that could devastate much of human civilization. If this is even partially true, we might need to consider radical solutions,...
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Bad Whitey 101, Second Semester
The University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development has declared that all prospective teachers must be taught that some teachers are too white, too rich, too privileged, and too oppressive. This announcement recalls the shenanigans at the University of Delaware, reported in these pages last year. The students there were being taught that...
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The Great American Outlaw
When Public Enemies was making the rounds in theaters across America last summer, doing nearly $100 million of business domestically, I was reminded that we Americans love our outlaws—not our criminals, mind you, but our outlaws. It is a distinction with a difference. Criminals prey on the weak and vulnerable, mug old men and snatch...
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A Hard Habit to Break
On Friday, December 18, 2009, some lucky person became the first motorist in over 35 years to travel a two-block stretch of Main Street in Rockford, Illinois. The ride must have lasted all of 60 seconds—perhaps 90, if he slowed down to view the handful of restaurants and storefronts that had, until a few months...
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Swiss Minarets
Swiss voters approved a constitutional amendment banning the construction of new minarets last November, to the howls of bien-pensant rage at home and abroad. The proposal was supported by 57.5 percent of the participating voters and 22 of the 26 Swiss cantons. It was originally drafted in May 2007 by a group of conservative politicians,...
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Sachs of Gold
The story thus far: Not content with plunging the world’s economy into the worst crisis since the 30’s, the avaricious and reckless bankers have been saved from ruin—momentarily—by our taxes, yet they continue to treat us with breathtaking contempt. Far from feeling any remorse or humility, they pay themselves annual bonuses larger than what most...
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Conservatives Leninists and the War on Terror
One long-standing hallmark of Western conservative thought is the emphasis on the rule of law. Earlier generations of conservatives understood that, without such constraints, liberty would be imperiled and a free society would ultimately descend into tyranny. As Lord Acton observed, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Even during the 20th century,...
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Print the Legend
It was about 3 p.m. on October 26, 1881, as Tombstone’s town marshal, Virgil Earp (also a deputy U.S. marshal), his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and the Earps’ eccentric friend Dr. John H. Holliday confronted Isaac and William Clanton and Thomas and Robert Findley McLaury near the O.K. Corral. After 30 seconds of firing, Morgan...
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Redesigned
Readers will notice a few changes in the format of the February number. This is the first major overhaul since I became editor in 1985, and even a reader as visually impaired as the editor will note the larger and clearer type, the more balanced layout, and—if I may rhapsodize—the sense of spaciousness. None of...
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Enough is Enough
Taki Theodoracopulos’s nondefense defense of Roman Polanski (“The Limits of Compassion,” Under the Black Flag, December 2009) reads like the deluded ramblings of a washed-up bon vivant who desperately needs to be back in the good graces of the popular but poor soul who drugged and anally raped a 13-year-old girl. Did the early tragedies...
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Greek Diary I
Greece is an ancient land but a young country, younger even than the United States, whose citizens have grown old, generation after generation, bragging about the youthfulness of their democracy. Here in Greece, as Toynbee pointed out in one of his last books, the multiple burdens of the ...
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Crisis of the Government Party
President Obama is in a dilemma from which there appears to be no easy or early escape. Democrats are the Party of Government. They feed it, and it feeds them. The larger government grows, the more agencies that are created, the more bureaucrats who are hired, the more people who become beneficiaries, the more deeply...
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State of the Union
You can see how seriously Obama is taking the hot populist temper of the American people and their eagerness to strangle every banker with the entrails of every insurance executive. In an altogether welcome departure from past presidential form in State of the Union addresses at least since 1973 (the ...
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In Praise of Euphemism
I got into it recently—in cordial fashion—with the editors of an editorial page for which I used to labor. One of their columnists had used a word . . . well, let’s say we wouldn’t have printed it in Ye Olden Tyme. The editors took exception to the exception I took to the word’s appearance...
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Tax-Cut Time
It’s jobs, jobs, jobs now for the Obama team, rather than health care, health care, health care. You have to call it progress, particularly if you’re jobless, or fearful of becoming so at a time when 17 million Americans are either non- or underemployed. We’re about done, in other words, with the free-floating pretense that...
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Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 4
Next let us turn to Woods’ comments on my discussion of scarcity as an economic concept. I again quoted Paul Samuelson who introduces the topic as fundamental to economic analysis and concludes by saying: “If you add up all the wants, you quickly find that there are simply not enough goods and services to satisfy...
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Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 4
Next let us turn to Woods’ comments on my discussion of scarcity as an economic concept. I again quoted Paul Samuelson who introduces the topic as fundamental to economic analysis and concludes by saying: “If you add up all the wants, you quickly find that there are simply not enough goods and services to satisfy...
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Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 3
Next we must look at another rhetorical device of Woods which serves to distract the attention of the reader from the point at issue and to prejudice him against what I actually wrote. Woods mentions the interventions of bishops’ conferences into economic matters. As a matter of fact I said absolutely nothing in my article...
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Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 3
Next we must look at another rhetorical device of Woods which serves to distract the attention of the reader from the point at issue and to prejudice him against what I actually wrote. Woods mentions the interventions of bishops’ conferences into economic matters. As a matter of fact I said ...
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Campus Rebellion
It's a story told regularly in the conservative media. A student pleads for advice: The professors at his college or university are left-wing, and he must choose between regurgitating the leftist propaganda in class discussions, term papers, exam answers, and essays for an A, or telling the truth for a ...
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Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 2
Dr. Woods’ article, “Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy Revisited: A Reply to Thomas Storck,” is, I must admit, superficially attractive. It appears to crush opposition under a weight of impressive learning. But, I would suggest, when his assertions are examined, Woods’ citation of authorities, like his argument in general, fails. I begin with...
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Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 2
Dr. Woods’ article, “Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy Revisited: A Reply to Thomas Storck,” is, I must admit, superficially attractive. It appears to crush opposition under a weight of impressive learning. But, I would suggest, when his assertions are examined, Woods’ citation of authorities, like his ...
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Creative Destruction—January 2010
PERSPECTIVE When the Going Gets Tough . . . by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Mass Age Medium and Future Shlock by James O.Tate Making sense of the 60’s. How To Survive “Creative Destruction” by Greg Kaza Clarifying terms. NEWS Too Big To Fail by William J. Quirk The underlying cause. REVIEWS At the Crossroads by Justin Raimondo Anne C. Heller: Ayn ...
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When the Going Gets Tough . . .
Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore ...
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Is Thomas Woods A Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 1
Almost five years ago I wrote for ChroniclesMagazine.org a piece attacking Thomas Woods’ views on the relationship between Catholic social teaching and the science of economics. In brief, my complaint was against Woods’ contention that certain teachings of the popes on social matters overstep the boundaries of legitimate Church teaching because they contradict the findings...
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Heading Back into Clinton-time
What lies ahead politically? Look for an answer back in the ’90s. Even if the Republicans don’t take over after the midterm elections, the Democratic Party now in Congress is dominated by politicians fashioned in the Clinton era, nourished by such heirs of Aristotle as Rahm Emanuel and, before him, Tony Coelho. Their maps had...
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Is a U.S. Default Inevitable?
We were blindsided. We never saw it coming. So said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein of the financial crisis of 2008. He likened its probability to four hurricanes hitting the East Coast in a single season. Blankfein was reminded by the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee, Phil Angelides, that hurricanes are “acts of...
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The Right Word
Can’t stand to watch the English language’s losing encounter with the culture of who-cares-anyway? A new book says, get over it, fella. “Too often,” argues Jack Lynch, professor of English at Rutgers University, “the mavens and pundits are talking through their hats. They’re guilty of turning superstition into rules, and often their proclamations are nothing...
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Insouciant Americans
The Underwear Bomber case indicates that whoever is behind these bomb scares is laughing at our gullibility. How realistic is it that al-Qaida, an organization that allegedly pulled off the most fantastic terror attack in world history, would in these days of heightened security choose for an attack on an airliner a person who is...
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Why Are They at War With Us?
“We are at war. We are at war against al-Qaida, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again.” Thus did Barack Obama clear the air as to whether we are at war, and with whom and why....
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