On New Year’s Day, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki issued an ultimatum to the West: Accept a swap of part of our 2 ton stockpile of low-enriched uranium for your higher-enriched uranium for our U.S.-built reactor, or we start enriching to 20 percent ourselves. Though the White House is on the defensive for its initial...
Year: 2010
Post
Faust
German movies of the 1920's receive a remarkably poor press in conservative circles. Some critics regard them as little more than obvious reflections of Weimar decadence, as some of the lesser films doubtless are. Sometimes even the ubiquitous use of expressionist technique is presented as definitive proof that the mental ...
Post
Church and State A
Post
A Chat With a Cabdriver
Britain was tense last October when the BBC announced that Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party, would be interviewed on one of its programs. They’s fightin’ again at the BBC, said a London cabdriver. It was front-page news for two weeks before the interview, and what began on the morning after could only...
Post
Letter From the Classroom: Mashie Niblicks of the World, Unite!
My charming, patient Post-War British Fiction-studying undergraduates are currently becalmed in the brackish waters of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine, the first novel of his Alexandria Quartet. I say “brackish” because Mr. Durrell can scarce forbear to use the adjective when Alexandria’s salt-sea breezes blow off the torpid waters of the port. Torpid—there’s another word to conjure...
Post
Courtesy
I have read somewhere that courtesy is the highest form of charity. Whether or not that is true (I like to think it is), courtesy is certainly charity in its least expensive form. Which prompts the question of why, in the age of what an anonymous wit a generation or so ago dubbed conspicuous benevolence,...
Post
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan, like many of those in the lively arts, frequently urges us to admire his present work rather than to dwell on his past triumphs, although he has been known to make an exception to the rule when it comes time to release his latest greatest-hits package. Unlike some rock-music critics, I’m happy to...
Post
Nestorius of Constaninople
In 428 AD [sic], Giusto Traina has written a brief and engaging overview of the Mediterranean and Near East in the early fifth century. Traina, an ancient historian with a strong interest in classical Armenia, chose to survey the events of that year owing to its pivotal importance for the political and cultural history of...
Post
Got Your Goat
The Men Who Stare at Goats Produced by Smoke House and BBC Films Directed by Grant Heslov Screenplay by Peter Straughan from the book by Jon Ronson Distributed by Overture Films I’ll say this for The Men Who Stare at Goats, the delightful new film from first-time director Grant Heslov and his producing partner, George Clooney:...
Post
How to Survive “Creative Destruction”: Clarifying Terms
The phrase “creative destruction” has become nearly ubiquitous in analyses of job losses in the domestic manufacturing sector or in states that once had a large industrial presence. A generation of market-based economists, conservative and libertarian alike, have routinely used it to defend the new economic status quo of fewer jobs and stagnant real-income growth. ...
Post
Guns Incorporated?
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review McDonald v. City of Chicago, a case that presents the watershed issue of whether the individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, established in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller, applies to states. Most Court observers agree that it appears very likely that the...
Post
The Mass Age Medium and Future Shlock: Making Sense of the 60’s
The recent passing of Mary Travers—who, with Peter and Paul, was years ago always intoning that the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind—brought back some quaint memories of kumbaya moments, and the consoling thought that at least Mary Travers lived long enough to see her political vision fulfilled in the person of Barack...
Post
The Peter Principle
All across America this Valentine’s Day platoons of men will stand at the counters of flower shops and grocery stores, clutching cards, chocolates, and roses to their chests, tokens of affection for their wives and lady friends (and sometimes, no doubt, for both). Their dilatory homage to the patron saint of love always brings a...
Post
The Body’s Vest
Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide. —Andrew Marvell (1621-78), “The Garden” Browsing through the poetry section at Borders, I came upon a sole copy of a new book of poems by Fred Chappell, Shadow Box. I have been an admirer of Chappell’s fiction for years, especially his novel I...
Post
At the Crossroads
At the Crossroads by Justin Raimondo “No one is free save Jove.” —Aeschylus Up until now, Ayn Rand hasn’t had a biographer worthy of the name: only the memoirs of embittered ex-followers, or hagiographies written by devotees. Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made remedies that lack. It’s the first serious attempt...
Post
Muslim Problem
It isn’t all that easy being a paleoconservative/libertarian as well as the editorial director of Antiwar.com. I would estimate that more than half of my readers and financial supporters are from the left side of the political spectrum, although there is a substantial libertarian contingent. The ideological overlap—a mutual opposition to our interventionist foreign policy,...
Post
Cash For Clunkers
When Alan Blinder first proposed the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), commonly referred to as the Cash for Clunkers program, in a July 2008 New York Times op-ed, he foresaw benefits to the economy and the environment, and a “more equal income distribution.” The program has fallen rather short of its intended mark. Most of...
Post
Janie’s Got a Gun
The bodies were barely cold at Ft. Hood when Slate.com writer William Saletan unlimbered his guns. It is, he announced, time for the military to lift its policy exempting women from combat. His reason? A female civilian cop, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, took down Maj. Nidal Hasan and stopped the shooting spree that left 13 dead...
Post
Pancho Villa
There are hundreds of Mexican restaurants in the United States named for the revolutionary Pancho Villa. Photos of the Durango native line the walls, and his raid on the small American hamlet of Columbus, New Mexico, is celebrated. Nowhere is mentioned the many atrocities Villa and his forces regularly committed. Torture, rape, and murder were...
Post
Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
At the 1992 Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton adopted Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinkin’ About Tomorrow)” as his unofficial theme song. Its bouncy, optimistic strains would be reflected in Clinton’s line, four years later, that “We do not need to build a bridge to the past, we need to build a bridge to the future.”...
Post
Coming to America
A recent article in a glossy magazine about the rich and famous mentioned a $35 million house in Malibu, California, whose neighbors include Mel Gibson and Britney Spears. The owner of this mega-structure is one Teodoro Nguema Obiang, son of a man who goes by the same name. Obiang Junior is 38 years old and...
Post
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 trouble upon them . ....
Post
Fish or Cut Bait
President Obama’s nationally televised speech announcing an increase in troop levels in Afghanistan was everything we have come to expect from one of his speeches: vapid, dishonest, puerile, and–most of all–confused. Speaking grandly of an exit strategy he never defined, he did not once address the more serious question of an entrance strategy. What possible...
Post
No More Blues
Where is the blues in jazz when we need it? Throughout most of its history jazz was a blues music, at least until the avant-gardists of the 1960’s tried to burn down the cathedral in their trumped-up revolution against American society, playing music unfocused in concept, unmusical in sound, and unpleasant in performance. They made...
Post
Too Big to Fail: The Underlying Cause
“We need radical change,” Lord Turner, chairman of England’s Financial Services Authority, said recently. “And parts of the financial services industries need to reflect deeply on their role in the economy, and to recommit to a focus on their essential social and economic functions, if they are to regain public trust.” The British are engaged...
Post
Ethnic Cleansing
Some memories of auld lang syne on New Year's Day 2010. This Rockford Files first appeared in the August 2002 issue of Chronicles. Family traditions often get started by accident—especially, perhaps, those that center on food. On the second New Year’s Eve after we were married, my wife and ...