The proposal to build a mosque in Manhattan near the site of the Twin Towers has ignited the usual futile debate that marks all political discussion in America. I don't know which set of arguments is more degrading, the opponents' cry of insensitivity or the defenders' claim of religious freedom.
Year: 2010
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Walk Like an Egyptian
About the time that we moved into our current house, my grandmother gave me a pot of Egyptian walking onions. Winter hardy to Zone 3, they are perfect for Rockford, where many plants that are perennial in my native Michigan struggle to make it through our harsher winters. I’ll ...
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Bringing Down Brussels
As everyone knows, Greece became a member of the eurozone on the back of a lie. The colonels’ regime had collapsed, Greek politicians were nervous, and that pseudo-French aristocrat Giscard promised entry to a country that is more Middle Eastern than European, but with olive oil. Entry meant ...
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Another Glenn Beck Brainstorm
There is no denying Glenn Beck’s great popularity with many Americans who see themselves as conservatives. Joe Carter of First Things recently offered a reminder of why this popularity is unfortunate. In an appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s program, Beck denied that legal recognition of gay marriage would harm the United States and stated, “I believe...
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Insulting Our Intelligence
What a good thing, from the Democratic perspective, so many of America's schools are in such miserable shape. It means, apparently, Democrats think they can insult voters' intelligence right and left and get away with it, at least until Election Day. After which, they'll think of some other way to ...
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Our Clueless Professor
Have we ever had a president so disconnected from the heart of America? On Friday night, at a White House iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, Obama strode directly into the blazing controversy over whether a mosque should be built two blocks from Ground Zero. Speaking as though this were ...
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Driving Home Their Point
A recent story in the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, California, gives the lie to the notion that illegal aliens are just here “to do the jobs Americans won’t do” and are largely a law-abiding class of the downtrodden, shifting where they can for work. In May, the newspaper reported that “activists” warn illegal-alien drivers about sobriety...
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Where the Demons Dwell: The Antichrist Right
Those blissfully ignorant of right-wing soap opera will have never noticed the Antichrist Right, a loose coalition of writers who regard the Church as the worst thing that ever happened to Western civilization. If I understand correctly, the Antichrist Right would describe Christianity much as Christianity defines evil: a ...
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A Plague on Both Their Houses
What can you do to make the worst of a bad situation? The Democrats know how: they have decided (temporarily) to shaft their welfare-consuming constituents--by cutting out Food Stamps--in order to help teachers and other government
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Those Were the Days
Things I miss: Boys who carried paper routes and mowed lawns. Women and girls in actual dresses. When you seldom had to call up a corporation, but when you did you reached friendly, helpful Americans instead of recorded messages, Procrustean menus, and Hindu sing-song. Men who walked in a congenial, alert ...
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Atomic Anniversary
Sixty-five years ago, on August 6, the United States dropped the first offensive nuclear weapon in history. This bomb, code-named “Little Boy,” killed around 140,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan. The U.S. military dropped the second and last nuclear weapon ever used in war, “Fat Man,” three days later ...
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How To Succeed in Banking Without Really Trying
The Bush-Obama financial-rescue plan is premised on saving the big banks that caused the trouble. The theory is that we need to help Wall Street to help Main Street. Government would make money available, and the banks would make loans to business, which would revive the economy. ...
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The New Racism
Friends of Omar Thornton, the black male who killed eight co-workers and then himself, say he was driven to the point of despair by the racists he worked with. The trucking company for whom he worked has pointed out that he never filed a complaint. Thornton went on his killing spree when he was shown...
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The Very Definition of Arrogance
A California federal judge just provided the very definition of arrogance, in ruling that Proposition 8, the California law codifying marriage as between a man and a woman, lacked even a “rational basis” and was therefore unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. So much for the beliefs that created Western civilization....
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GOP Blank Check for War?
High among the blunders of history was the “blank cheque” Kaiser Wilhelm gave Vienna, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to deal with the Serbs as they saw fit. Five weeks later, Vienna cashed the check and declared war, after Belgrade refused to submit to all 10 demands of an ultimatum. Russia mobilized; Germany...
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Paul Ryan and the Perils of Realism
We've gone as a nation, in less than two years, from Hope and Change to
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Sex and Post—Christian Arithmetic
What is a school? Today, we think of school as an institution or even as a building. But school comes from the Greek skhole, “leisure”—i.e., clear your schedule of mundane tasks and make time to contemplate what matters. It only makes sense, then, that parents who send their children to school, and the teachers who...
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Atomic Anniversary
Sixty-five years ago, on August 6, the United States dropped the first offensive nuclear weapon in history. This bomb, code-named “Little Boy,” killed around 140,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan. The U.S. military dropped the second and last nuclear weapon ever used in war, “Fat Man,” three days later on nearby Nagasaki, killing approximately 39,000 people....
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Retreat From Eden
You do not need to be a reader of this column to surmise that the South of Italy is as close as one can get to Paradise without being a Nazi war criminal, in which case, needless to say, one resides in South America. We’ve got everything in Sicily, from medlars in springtime and tangerines...
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The Happy Few
Stendhal had the delightful habit of ending his books with the closing dedication, in English, “TO THE HAPPY FEW.” The phrase is thought to be a borrowing from Henry V (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . . ”) or perhaps from Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, where the vicar anticipates his...
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That Election
The Cabinet Office in London’s Whitehall is not generally a hotbed of tourist activity. The building’s squat, granite façade is screened from public view by a somehow incongruously lush row of elm trees, and, within, it’s a warren of nondescript, government-furnished cubicles typically inhabited by middle-aged men in suits writing memos to one another. For...
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Authentic Communities
Deep in the heart of man there is a need imprinted by nature that may very well be his basic difference from all other animals: Being a thinking one—i.e., an animal capable of self-awareness—man needs to be something meaningful in his own eyes, something which deserves to exist, possessed of a certain dignity. All men...
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Worse Than Obama?
The Obama administration declared the mid-June announcement that BP was establishing an escrow fund worth $20 billion to pay compensation claims to Gulf Coast residents and businesses to be a resounding victory for the White House, but what it actually showed was Obama’s hands-off, indifferent management style, in which nothing is ever clearly or properly...
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Sympathetic Magic
Endorsements by Christopher Hitchens and Nora Ephron do not inspire confidence in Bright-Sided. Nor does Barbara Ehrenreich’s website, with its list of soporific-sounding previous publications, which includes Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad and Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Her enumerated interests also threaten tedium—healthcare, peace,...
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The Last Gasp
Breathless (À bout de souffle) Produced by Les Productions Georges de Beauregard Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard Distributed by Rialto Pictures This past May, French director Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature film, Breathless (À bout de souffle), was rereleased in a new print on its 50th anniversary. It was briefly screened in various American...
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Falling Apart
North-central Idaho is rugged canyon, mountain, and ranch country. Its dominant culture is that of the British and American borderlands. Its people are descendants of 19th-century pioneers and homesteaders (some of them Missouri Confederates who went west after the war). They are fiercely individualistic, but they also take care of one another. They know how to...
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The Creaturely Myth
There is—there must be–all the difference in the world between an autobiography and a novel written in the first person. Are we clear? Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History, for example, has much in common with Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield or even Great Expectations, with the obvious exceptions that the “truth” seems to be fiction, and...
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Where the Demons Dwell: The Antichrist Right
Those blissfully ignorant of right-wing soap opera will have never noticed the Antichrist Right, a loose coalition of writers who regard the Church as the worst thing that ever happened to Western civilization. If I understand correctly, the Antichrist Right would describe Christianity much as Christianity defines evil: a shadowy, parasitic negation that possesses no...
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California Ecclesiazusae
During the June primary campaign for governor of California, a GOP operative told me that the plan of the party elites is to nominate Mitt Romney for president in 2012, with Meg Whitman as his running mate. That way, she would spend hundreds of millions of dollars of her fortune on the campaign, enriching every...
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Newsweeklies In Hell
Every Easter and Christmas at least one of America’s three newsweeklies—Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report—includes articles trashing Christian dogmas. For Easter 2010, Newsweek featured a piece by religion editor Lisa Miller blurbing her new book, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife. Concerning the resurrection of men, she wrote, “It’s a supernatural...
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Bear
We were driving back to Michigan after a conference on Herbert Hoover that I had organized for the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, in 1984. After you get past Hammond and Gary, Indiana is flat but quite nice. Our beautiful Buick 225 Ultra blew the head gasket on the Indiana Toll Road near...
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Dialoguing With Douthat
Surely, the defining characteristic of the paleoconservative temperament is disgust—with the current state of the country, the culture, and (most of all) the “official” conservative movement. On this last point, there can be no compromise: Eight long years of Bushism, with a foreign policy energized by neoconservative democratism, has bankrupted the country financially and bankrupted...
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A Defining Moment
In itself, the Israeli military’s raid on the “Free Gaza” aid flotilla was proof, as the astute thinker Forrest Gump put it, that “Stupid is as stupid does.” The flotilla was sponsored by a mishmash of Western lefty peaceniks and Turkish-backed Islamist groups that were trying, to use historian Daniel Boorstin’s term, to produce a...
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Die, Belgium, Die!
Most English schoolboys learn this quip: Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy the French. Which is just about true. And if you don’t understand why and how Belgium was invented, you won’t understand the significance of the elections in Belgium earlier this summer. In 1795 the revolutionary French occupied what were...
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Driving Home Their Point
A recent story in the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, California, gives the lie to the notion that illegal aliens are just here “to do the jobs Americans won’t do” and are largely a law-abiding class of the downtrodden, shifting where they can for work. In May, the newspaper reported that “activists” warn illegal-alien drivers about sobriety...
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How Aussies Lost Their Pride of Erin
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze” Some recent Australian cultural trends—massive Islamic immigration, for instance—are so...
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Walk Like an Egyptian
About the time that we moved into our current house, my grandmother gave me a pot of Egyptian walking onions. Winter hardy to Zone 3, they are perfect for Rockford, where many plants that are perennial in my native Michigan struggle to make it through our harsher winters. I’ll admit that I struggle a bit...
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The Path to Modernity
The Hobbesian mayhem that struck Europe in the first half of the 17th century was not an event, or a series of events, befitting the designation of a war. The plural form, as in the Napoleonic Wars, would be more apt. It was a pancontinental minus-sum-game involving all major players (save Russia) that continued, relentlessly,...
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Bringing Down Brussels
As everyone knows, Greece became a member of the eurozone on the back of a lie. The colonels’ regime had collapsed, Greek politicians were nervous, and that pseudo-French aristocrat Giscard promised entry to a country that is more Middle Eastern than European, but with olive oil. Entry meant no more tanks surrounding Parliament at midnight—rather...
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Looking Backwards
“Whose picture is this, Daddy?” The little blond girl is 11 years old, and, as she flips through the iScraps, her smooth round face shows the first twinge of the questioning mind that will disturb the complacency on which all future happiness depends. “That’s my grandfather.” “Your grandfather? He doesn’t look a bit like us,”...
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How To Succeed in Banking Without Really Trying
The Bush-Obama financial-rescue plan is premised on saving the big banks that caused the trouble. The theory is that we need to help Wall Street to help Main Street. Government would make money available, and the banks would make loans to business, which would revive the economy. “Once you assume,” Michael Lewis, author of The...
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Fantastic Allegations
I am the author of the books They Were White and They Were Slaves and Judaism Discovered. After accurately stating those facts in the June 2010 Chronicles, Scott P. Richert proceeded to pen a farrago of pseudobiography (“You Say Ásátru, I Say Shoresh,” Rockford Files), stating that this writer received a $40,000 contract from “School...
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Coming Home at Last?
Asked if the United States might send still more troops to Afghanistan, if the Obama surge is not succeeding by year’s end, Vice President Joe Biden answered, “I do not believe so.” So, that is it. Biden is saying the 100,000 U.S. troops in theater or on the way is our limit. If Kabul and...
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Will WikiLeaks Help End the Afghan War?
The brave hope of the soldier who sent 92,000 secret documents to WikiLeaks was that the disclosure of willful, casual slaughter of civilians by coalition personnel (with ensuing cover-ups), the utter failure of
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A Proto-Puritan Robin
A review of Robin Hood; produced and distributed by Universal Pictures; directed by Ridley Scott; screenplay by Brian Helgeland. Since his earliest appearances in folk ballads of the 13th century, Robin Hood has been a slippery fox of a hero. He’s a man who thumbs his nose at the powerful while going his merry way...
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Perpetual Education for Perpetual Indoctrination
The Obama administration already wants every child to go to preschool and everyone to go to college. Yesterday I noticed a cover article in Time magazine taking aim at summer vacation. It seems our leaders want all young Americans in school, all the time. Forgive my skepticism, given the long track record of failure when...
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Calling Dr. Johnson
The Dear Leader of the United States reminds me of Robert Frost’s quip that a liberal is a man who won’t take his own side in a fight. More precisely, his own country’s side. Barack Obama seems to hate calling anyone our enemy. It isn’t nice. It’s not Christian, as he understands Christianity. Well, Christ...
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Let’s Hear it for Free Speech
The media chitchat these days is of the media itself, and of, Lordy, how'd things ever get this way! You know what way I mean—the way it is now, with right-wing extremists (centered on Fox News and the Breitbart blogs) injecting lies and fables into the national bloodstream and the ...
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Trusted Most—Men with Guns
Public confidence in Congress has plummeted to the lowest level of any institution since Gallup began asking the question in 1973. One-half of all Americans have little or no confidence in the Congress. Only 11 percent have a
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Recovering Our Roots—August 2010
perspective Looking Backwards by Thomas Fleming views Authentic Communities by Claude Polin Where the Demons Dwell: The Antichrist Right by Jerry D. Salyer news California Ecclesiazusae by John C. Seiler, Jr. reviews The Creaturely Myth by James O. Tate [Karl Rove, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight] The Path to Modernity by Srdja Trifkovic [Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years ...