There must be some reason or reasons, why the Jerk has become the archetypal American character. Without going too deep into themysteries of social history, here is a little experiment that might stand in for several hundred pages of tedious social history. Herewith a little theoretical foundation for my ...
Month: March 2011
Post
From the Shores of Tripoli to the Halls of Montezuma
I have so far refrained from commenting on the Libyan fiasco. I do not understand what is going on, and the administration has so far not condescended to enlighten us. We are not taking sides or deciding the future of the country–that is up to the Libyans, we say–but then declare that no outcome is...
Post
A Reminder of Hope
As our country plunges into yet another foolish war in the Moslem world and teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, it is easy to be focused on the negative. But today’s news also brought a small reminder of hope. The synod of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, meeting in Lvov, just elected 40-year old Sviatoslav Shevchuk,...
Post
Oh, What a Stupid War!
The war on Libya now being waged by the U.S., Britain and France must surely rank as one of the stupidest martial enterprises, smaller in scale to be sure, since Napoleon took it into his head to invade Russia in 1812. Let's start with the fierce hand-to-hand combat between members ...
Post
How Killing Libyans Became a Moral Imperative
“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” So wrote the poet Byron, who would himself die just days after landing in Greece to join the war for independence from the Turks. But in that time, Americans followed the dictum of Washington, Adams and Jefferson: Stay out of foreign wars. America “goes not abroad...
Post
The Rising Irrelevance of Obama
“This will not stand!” declared George H.W. Bush. He was speaking of Saddam Hussein’s invasion, occupation and annexation of the emirate of Kuwait as his “19th province.” Seven months later, the Iraqi army was fleeing up the “Highway of Death” back into a country devastated by five weeks of U.S. bombing. When Bush spoke, the...
Post
Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask,
Post
Europe’s Uncrowned Leader
“Total German triumph as EU minnows subjugated,” The Daily Telegraph headlines a report by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s latest diktat. Whoever wants credit must fulfill our conditions, she declared. Her conditions amount to capitulation by three vulnerable states on core policies, and further erosion of sovereignty for the rest of the eurozone. For...
Post
Barred From Canada: An Update
On March 3 Ambassador James Bissett had a letter published in Alberta’s premier daily, the Edmonton Journal, taking issue with an “assistant adjunct” professor [sic!] at the University of Alberta who had voiced support for the cancellation of my lectures at UBC and UofA because of my “denial of genocide” ...
Post
Can Japan Rise Again?
We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan's dead might number in the millions. Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls it the worst crisis since World War II. Yet, horrendous as it is, it does not, thus far, compare with that. For the ...
Post
Teachers and Parents
Our national weeping and wailing over education spending cuts, public employee unions, and such like cause minds of a certain vintage to stop still and wonder. When were the divorce proceedings between home and classroom filed anyway? And who filed them, and why? It can be argued that the current ...
Post
Lying in a Good Cause
James O'Keefe scored another victory recently, when his group tricked Ron Schiller, an NPR fundraiser into making statements that were soft on militant Islam and expressed contempt for Middle American conservatives. As much as I detest NPR and all its works, the attack on the fundraisers is either naive or ...
Post
The King Hearings: Necessary in Principle, Unlikely To Provide Answers in Practice
Rep. Peter King (R-NY) chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, started his congressional hearing on Islamic radicalization Thursday amidst accusations of “Islamophobia” from the Sharia activists and expressions of distaste from most Democrats. In his opening statement King cited recent terror plots against the United States to justify his decision and suggested the hearings...
Post
Spencer for Hire
Robert Spencer is making something of a nuisance of himself these days. I don’t know much about Spencer. I do not spend a lot of time looking at websites and hardly ever visit Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch. It is not that I particularly disagree with him on the Muslim threat; it is only that he...
Post
Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime Book III
In the third book of his Ancien Régime, Alexis de Tocqueville takes up the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. AT notes the at first sight strange phenomenon, that in absolutist France intellectuals were free to challenge the most fundamental political, social, and religious institutions and beliefs. While each
Post
Robert Gates, Neo-Isolationist?
Robert Gates, Neo-Isolationist? by Patrick J. Buchanan • March 3, 2011 • Printer-friendly “(A)ny future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as Gen. MacArthur so delicately put it,” Robert Gates has just told...
Post
Organized Coercion
The more it changes, the more it's the same, hmmm? In this present instance, meaning our country's seemingly fresh-scented wrangle over union power. The scent isn't fresh at all, nor is the wrangle. The arguments are old, the question at stake is old: namely, when is the public interest served ...
Post
Blowback: “Kosovars” Strike Again
The jihadist murder of two American servicemen by a “Kosovar”-Albanian Muslim at Frankfurt Airport on March 2 combines the fruits of the United States’ criminally misguided Balkan policy over the past two decades and of Europe’s suicidal immigration policy since the 1960’s. While it is probably too late ...
Post
Free Speech or Federal Tyranny?
Today’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church has encouraged many decent conservatives to think that the United States will not so quickly go down the garden path of political correctness as Canada and the EU. I think this view is seriously mistaken. As everyone knows, the Westboro Baptist “Church” is a...
Post
Not Necessarily Muslim
A January 24 bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport left 35 dead and scores injured, as the Russian capital’s transportation system was targeted by terrorists for the second time in less than a year. The most likely culprits are Muslim terrorists from the North Caucasus who had struck Moscow’s metro system in March 2010. In the...
Post
The Scandal in Vancouver
I am not alone in being utterly astounded by the fact that Dr. Srdja Trifkovic has been refused entry into Canada. This amazing decision is all the more scandalous in that it was taken ad hoc in response to the hate campaign by self-declared representatives of one Bosnian ethnic group ...
Post
Suffer the Little Children—March 2011
beyond the revolution To Save One Child by Thomas Fleming views Growing Up Too Fast by Christopher Sandford Going Down With the Good Ship Lollipop by Jack Trotter news Interview With the Archbishop of Kirkuk by Alberto Carosa reviews A Life Rediscovered by John Willson American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll by Bradley J. Birzer The Elusive Conflict by H.A. Scott Trask The American Civil War: ...
Post
More Neocon Follies
I have received only one copy of your filthy magazine, but that is enough. I based my decision to subscribe to Chronicles on an ad you mailed me. The ad made it appear that Chronicles is a serious, conservative publication similar to those I already subscribe to: the Wall Street Journal, Human Events, National Review,...
Post
Another Brown Scare
In the run-up to World War II, when FDR was locked in a political struggle with his conservative Republican opponents, Roosevelt’s “brain trust” came up with a scheme to win the war of ideas and get rid of the President’s bothersome critics. Today, we call it the “Brown Scare.” It was a campaign of vilification...
Post
A Sicilian Mirage
Everybody laughed at me as usual. The state of absolute passivity outwardly resembling the comatose, but distinguishable from it by voluntary alimentation and libation, was derided by my friends as unattainable. A Sicilian mirage. Yet it had been an idée fixe for years, my vision of a holiday so impeccably philistine it would reduce me...
Post
The Women Come and Go. . .
If the media could invent a headline that comprehensively described the definitive news of the world today, it would be something like Experts Confirm Top Rail Is on Bottom. For almost my entire working life I have been hearing how the upper classes are being displaced by the lower ones, the American native-born by immigrants...
Post
Britain’s Leftists: Allies of the Islamists
The people of England, after very considerable provocation, have lately come to fear England’s Muslims. Britain’s leftists have shifted in the opposite direction. From an entrenched hostility to the mores of their own country and out of sheer perversity, the leftists have intensified their attacks on the Catholic Church, while making a point of defending...
Post
Growing Up Too Fast
In 2008, a young friend from the Czech Republic spent six months in the United States, in part to help me research a book on Roman Polanski and the mores of Hollywood in general. At first she was highly impressed by what she found there; she thought she had encountered a higher civilization. No one...
Post
Something Serious At Stake
In his prefatory essay to the premier issue of First Things in March 1990, editor Richard John Neuhaus stated that the purpose of the journal would be to discuss the relationship between “religion and public life.” Pastor Neuhaus also said that the journal might have been defined as a journal of religion and culture, culture...
Post
Bruised Reeds
In his Introduction, journalist Peter Seewald, who talked to the Holy Father over several hours at Castel Gandolfo for this book, points out that it is the first time a pope has engaged in such a personal interview. Although Seewald’s questions appear at times a little convoluted and repetitive, he can rightly take credit for...
Post
The Grit and the Gritless
True Grit Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen The Green Hornet Produced and distributed by Columbia Pictures Directed by Michel Gondry Screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg The King’s Speech Produced by See-Saw Films Directed by Tom Hooper Screenplay by David Seidler Distributed by The Weinstein...
Post
The Elusive Conflict
Of the making of Civil War books there shall be no end. There are so many, most of which cover the same bloody ground in much the same slogging way, without any new insight or contribution. To make matters worse, American historians have rewritten the war as a simplistic moral melodrama between the forces of...
Post
Going Down With the Good Ship Lollipop
“As long as our country has Shirley Temple, we will be all right.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt Have you been to a toy store lately? Barbie’s got some heavy competition these days. The Bratz collection, for instance: Yasmin, Sasha, Cloe, Jade—all household names for several years now. Check out that hot little number Sasha in her...
Post
A Life Rediscovered
ISI Books, the publishing arm of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is doing a great service by putting out the Lives of the Founders series, emphasizing “important but unjustly neglected figures of the American Founding.” Leaving aside for a moment the problems inherent in thinking about the last quarter of the 18th century as an “American...
Post
Interview With The Archbishop of Kirkuk
In his Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini, on “The Word of God in the Life and the Mission of the Church,” Pope Benedict XVI challenged Islamic countries to offer the same religious freedom that Muslims usually enjoy in predominantly Christian countries. Alas, the news is far from encouraging in countries such as Iraq and Egypt, where...
Post
Cutting Our Teeth On Twilight
To date, Stephenie Meyer’s young-adult novels about a teenage girl (Bella Swan) and her vampire boyfriend (Edward Cullen) have sold well over 100 million copies worldwide, and the movie versions are still coming. When a phenomenon is of this scale it doesn’t matter what a book is, artistically; you have to take such a cultural...
Post
Too Big To Bail
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner boasted on December 16 that 2008’s $700 billion bailout of an assortment of private enterprises would ultimately cost taxpayers less than congressional analysts had predicted. The green eyeshades had calculated that the enormous wealth transfer would end up docking us taxpayers a mere $25 billion. Without providing further detail, the secretary...
Post
Latino Fretting
Two days before Christmas, Edward Schumacher-Matos, a scribe for the Washington Post, worked himself into a lather because he believes the GOP is doomed at the ballot box unless it accommodates “Latino” concerns, mainly on immigration. Schumacher-Matos is wrong. The GOP can retain control of American politics as long as it gets most of the...
Post
Jumpin’ Jim Gavin
Like most kids I loved reading about Americans who rose from nothing to greatness. When I got to college and encountered my first left-wing history professor, I learned that Horatio Alger characters were pure myth—except I had already read and heard about dozens of them. One of my favorites was Jumpin’ Jim Gavin, the heroic...
Post
Oh I Wish I Was in Dixie
For a native son of the Midwest who has sympathized with the Southern states in the War of Northern Aggression for as far back as he can remember, I can see why some Southerners might find a certain justice in the impending fiscal collapse of the state that launched Abraham Lincoln, coming as it has...
Post
State of the Tepid
President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union Address was almost entirely focused on domestic issues. This was appropriate, considering the magnitude of social, economic, and moral problems America is facing, and the attendant impossibility of pursuing grand global themes for as long as those problems remain unresolved. His proposals for resolving them are surprisingly...
Post
The Eurozone: Time for a Divorce
The events of recent months present the eurozone as a dysfunctional bourgeois family, the latter-day Buddenbrooks morphing into Karamazovs. At the plot’s core is the loveless marriage of two incompatible, increasingly embittered partners. Teutonius is a rich yet parsimonious workaholic who abhors mortgages and long holidays. His much younger spouse, Meridiana, has inherited all the...
Post
An Arab Shopping Spree
What is it with the wives of despots? Leïla Ben Ali (Baba), ex-first lady of Tunisia and a former hairdresser, makes her escape from the country her hubby and her relatives raped, but not before a brief stop at the bank where she demands and receives one-and-a-half tons of gold—worth 67 million big ones—which she...
Post
To Save One Child
Gloria is angry. This is nothing new, of course, but these days her righteous indignation is directed against Hollywood. She is angry at Hollywood stars who adopt children only to neglect them, and she is outraged by stage parents who prostitute dim-witted girls like Britney and Lindsay and Miley to the entertainment “industry.” She says...
Post
A Game of Bridge on a Hot Afternoon
In retrospect, I find it shocking that, during World War II, Americans submitted without resistance to a kind of government-imposed serfdom that transformed our habits and our hearts. We have always prided ourselves on being independent, rebellious, even irreverent in the face of authority. In our mythology, we celebrate the defiant eccentric, the rebel, the...