Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will return to the Kremlin as president in 2012, ending speculation on the fate of the “national leader” and of the “tandem” he had formed with current President Dmitri Medvedev. Medvedev nominated Putin on September 24 during the congress of the ruling United Russia party, dashing the hopes of reformers...
Year: 2011
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Desperate Housewives
Those who have an interest in the cultural survival of the West may note with increasing trepidation that the very things that have traditionally characterized it are being cannibalized alive. Australia is no exception to this general trend. The thought occurred to me recently while visiting the more bohemian sections of Sydney’s Newtown district. Sitting...
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Partisan Revisionism
Richard Miles presents a new history of Carthage, which aims to show the land of Dido and Hannibal in a new light and rehabilitate the Punic state from what the author considers neglect and prejudice on the part of later historians. Miles especially succeeds in his descriptions and analysis of the military history of Carthage...
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Shane On Wheels
Drive Produced by Bold Films and Odd Lot Entertainment Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn Screenplay by Hossein Amini from the novel by James Sallis Distributed by Film District At the close of George Stevens’ 1953 big-screen version of Jack Schaefer’s novel, Shane, ten-year-old Joey Starrett (Brandon De Wilde) called repeatedly to his wounded idol,...
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The Seedbed of Renewal
Many people who consider themselves conservative are woefully ignorant of the culture they claim to defend. The list of causes is long: Television has largely destroyed storytelling, public school denigrates the idea of a common culture, and the internet has killed off lingering remnants of community. The music industry has replaced popular songwriting and songmaking...
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Of Monkeys and Mermaids
February 3, 1843 My Dearest Sabrina, Having momentarily sated what you once aptly termed my “Herculean appetite for lethargy,” I rouse myself dutifully to pen this somewhat belated missive, all too aware that you, my beloved sister, must be starved for news of your Charleston friends. Everyone inquires about you, of course, & I invariably...
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Immodest Proposals
Some 20 years ago at my alma mater, Lawrence Cunningham, now a professor of theology at Notre Dame, began a colloquium by asking the audience why the institution of the university exists. The audience offered suggestions such as “to prepare a trained workforce for the modern economy” and “to bring about social justice.” The professor...
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Aborted Economy
“Demography is destiny,” sociologists and demographers tell us. No. Morality is destiny. Demography stems from that, as does economics. Americans now are learning that lesson the hard way. Tax rates, debt, deficits, trade policy, monetary policy, government spending, and other factors all affect economic growth and prosperity. But they’re all trumped by demographics—and above that,...
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Thornton Wilder’s Depression
Thornton Wilder met Sigmund Freud in the fall of 1935. Freud had read Wilder’s new novel, Heaven’s My Destination. “‘No seeker after God,’” writes Wilder’s biographer (quoting Freud of himself), “he threw it across the room.” At a later meeting Freud apologized. He objected to Wilder’s “making religion a theme for amusement.” “Why should you...
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Am I a Threat to National Security?
When I first saw the memo from the FBI’s counterterrorism center in Newark, declaring that I’m “a threat to National Security,” not to mention an “agent of a foreign power,” I was incredulous. These can’t be real FBI documents, I thought to myself. Someone is pulling my leg. Sadly, no. As I discovered upon further...
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Statehood Bid
Much of the international politics of the 20th century revolved around the drive for national self-determination, such as that of the Serbs in the Balkans, setting in motion the crises that led to the Great War, or that of the Germans in the Sudetenland, aggravating the tensions that brought about the titanic clash between the...
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The Miracle Program
I wrote recently about the silly contemporary myth that portrays Christianity as implacably opposed to science and progress. The legend is thoroughly disproved by an abundance of counterexamples, but some of the available correctives are so powerfully convincing that they startle, and it is odd that Christian apologists have not used them more freely against...
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The Gales of November
“You’re probably not going to like this,” David Dale Johnson said, “but I’m suggesting we ask the Board of Review to reduce the assessment by $30,000.” I had retained David as a hired gun in my attempt to get our house’s assessment, and thus our property taxes, lowered. David knows a thing or two about...
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Running On Empty
All imperial projects eventually come to grief. The causes, time spans, and forms of decline differ from one great power to the next and from one century to another, but they all have in common one important feature: At some point the weakening hegemon is no longer able to bear the economic and financial burden...
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Fun With Panthers
The black American fugitive who was recently caught after 41 years on the lam brought back lots of memories. No, I’ve never been a fugitive from justice, and the memories are quite pleasant, because I met all those so-called Black Liberation Army con men in Algeria just about the time George Wright flew in from...
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The Tyranny of Democracy
Winston Churchill’s backhanded praise of democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried” is usually cited as the last word on the subject. It is a good way of closing off a dangerous topic of discussion, and it works quite well with that vast majority of people...
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Eddie Constable
In the 1940’s, towns like Framalopa were too small for chains like A&P and Piggly Wiggly. Consequently, the landscape was dotted with small neighborhood grocery stores, usually mom-and-pop operations with little merchandising and a spare inventory. You were lucky if you could choose between two brands of pickles. The vegetables came mostly from local truck...
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Unspoken Questions
We live in interesting times. In June of this year, the U.S. national soccer team played an “away” game against Mexico—in Los Angeles. Many of the 93,000 fans in the Rose Bowl booed the U.S. squad, chanted obscenities directed at the U.S. goalkeeper, and blew air horns during the U.S. national anthem. After Mexico won...
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A Kinder, Gentler Amnesty
By the time Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano confirmed the shift in policy, it was hardly a surprise. In an August 18 letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and 21 other Democratic senators, Napolitano acknowledged that removing people from the country simply for being illegal immigrants was no longer an “enforcement priority” of the...
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Erase Publica
It is impossible not to agree with Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s deep insight into the nature of modern democracies (“Contradiction and Collapse,” What’s Wrong With the World, September), all the more as it is enhanced by clear and rigorous phrasing. I have, however, an issue—maybe only semantic—with his initial assertion that there may be such a...
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The Greek Referendum: A Machiavellian Scenario
European politicians and commentators are predictably screaming blue murder over Prime Minister George Papandreou’s announcement that the Greek government will put the EU rescue package to a referendum, but I smell a rat. This looks like a cunning ploy, jointly engineered by Athens and Berlin, to get a more radical ...
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Worst Laid Plans
When Herman Cain made his irrelevant 9-9-9 tax plan a focal point of the current political debate, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich were quick to shout out their ‘Me too!’ Perry’s 20% flat tax, pulled out of the magic hat by a deft right hand, would produce a very serious revenue short fall, but...
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The Mob vs. the Statesman
For two decades now, Pat Buchanan has been warning us of the dangers our country faces. When he first started sounding the alarm, at the end of the Cold War, those dangers were hard to perceive. Now, they are hard to ignore. Pointless wars in the Mideast have resulted in thousands of...
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A Hellenic Haircut
There will be no Greek default—not for months to come at least, as we predicted here two weeks ago. The private banks that had splashed out on ostensibly lucrative Greek bonds will have to accept a “haircut” of fifty percent of their nominal value, according to an agreement reached early Thursday morning after days of...
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The Continuing Tory Revolution
I know it is none of my business. If the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth wish to change the rules of succession to the crown, I have no right to an opinion, not only because as an American I have about as much interest in royal antics as I do in soap operas…. Read...
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The End of the American Empire
Eight years ago when George Bush and his advisers decided to invade Iraq, the only moral or legal justification they could dream up was Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction.” At the time, I derided this claim, in print and on radio and television…. Read more and comment on The Daily...
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Is America Disintegrating?
In Federalist 2, John Jay looks out at a nation of a common blood, faith, language, history, customs and culture. “Providence,” he writes, “has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion … very similar in...
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Herman Cain and Obama’s 1000 Days
My latest on the Daily Mail takes up the rise and what I hope will be the fall of Herman Cain. I also have an even newer piece on Obama’s First 1000 Days. Please do not respond here, since what is really needed is a show of interest at the Daily Mail. I would rather be doing these pieces...
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Herman Cain and Obama’s 1000 Days
My latest on the Daily Mail takes up the rise and what I hope will be the fall of Herman Cain. I also have an even newer piece on Obama's First 1000 Days. Please do not respond here, since what is really needed is a show of interest at the ...
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Euro Woes
My stopover in Brussels on the way to the Balkans last week proved less than illuminating on the issue of the eurozone crisis and Greek debt. The real decisions are made further east, in Frankfurt and Berlin, but the EU apparat appears confident that there will be no Greek default in the short term and that Athens...
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U.S. and Saudi Relations on Oil
Pose a threat to the stability of Saudi Arabia, as the Shiite upsurges are now doing in Qatif and al-Awamiyah in the country’s oil-rich Eastern Province, and you’re brandishing a scalpel over the very heart of the long-term U.S. policy in the Middle East. The fall of America’s ally, the Shah of Iran, in...
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The End of Pax Americana?
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Observing the correlation of forces in this city and the intensity of conviction in the base of each party, the outcome of the ongoing fiscal fight between Barack Obama and the Tea Party Republicans seems preordained. Deadlock. There will be no big jobs-for-taxes deal. The can will be kicked down the road into...
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Success(ion)
The lifeblood of Chronicles is Tom Fleming, who took the reins of an interesting magazine in 1985 and turned it into an indispensable publication for anyone concerned about the future of this country. But the magazine that you hold in your hands today also owes its current form—and perhaps even ...
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The Capitalist Nonesuch
When the first of the truly modern “modern politicians” straddled the front page, even the meliorism junkies of the New York Times deemed it proper to lament the creature’s arrival and to bemoan its lack of substance. But the journalists, as always, had no clue. In an age when money is not only paper but...
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Medieval Modernism
Unlike certain 19th-century poets of difficult character or seemingly foredoomed, whom Paul Verlaine called maudits (accursed)—Rimbaud, Gérard de Nerval, Corbière, Verlaine himself—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was a pleasant, cheerful fellow. He, too, suffered misfortune, including illegitimate birth and absence of a father, unrequited love, wounding in the Great War, and premature death during the influenza epidemic...
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The Other Leviathan
The world has always been a place of unexamined terms. Probably it has never been so full of them as it is under modern democratic industrial capitalism, which—depending upon the rigor with which one defines the word democratic—is actually a contradiction in terms. Industrialism, which essentially is applied natural and human power on a large...
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Islam and Breivik’s Bombs
The killing of 8 people by a bomb in Oslo, placed by the Norwegian berserker Anders Behring Breivik, followed by his gunning down of a further 69 on the island of Utoya, is a horrible reminder of the potential for evil inherent in human nature. That he deliberately chose to gun down children in Utoya...
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Conan Doyle
On the evening of September 7, 1919, 60-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle sat down in a darkened room in Portsmouth, England, to speak with his son Kingsley, who had died in the Spanish-influenza epidemic ten months earlier. “We had strong phenomena from the start,” Conan Doyle later wrote to his friend and fellow occultist Oliver Lodge:...
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An Englishman in New York
The subway train clanked and screeched out of the darkness at last into stretched autumnal sunshine. I rattled northward in an emptying carriage gazing down on nameless, nondescript streets, and sometimes straight into ex-offices within which the same endeavors had probably been carried on from when the building had been erected in the early 20th...
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Ferals and Feds
Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man, was shot dead on Thursday, August 4, by police officers in Tottenham, a largely black and impoverished suburb of northeast London. Duggan was a member of the Star Gang, which has a reputation for carrying guns and dealing in hard drugs, and his apprehension was preplanned. It was originally...
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Sold, Not Bought
If you want to understand our current financial woes, skip the economists and go directly to the premiere analyst of the Great Depression, James M. Cain. His 1943 novel Double Indemnity (originally a 1936 serial that ran in Liberty) explains far better than spreadsheets the moral origins of our present financial misadventure. Cain once remarked...
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Carrying the Burden
The Help Produced by Dreamworks Pictures Directed and written by Tate Taylor from Kathryn Stockett’s novel Distributed by Walt Disney Studios The Guard Produced by Reprisal Films Directed and written by John McDonagh Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics I went to see The Help fully expecting it would be a travesty of race relations...
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A Sentimental Education
Many Americans probably think that the Pledge of Allegiance dates to the time of the American Revolution, but it was written more than a century later, in 1892. They might be shocked to learn that it was written by a Christian socialist, and the sanctifying words “under God” were not added until 1954. But they...
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Unreal Bodies, Unholy Blood
The vampire, possibly the most enduring mythic figure of the modern age, emerged out of the shadows of the Enlightenment. To be sure, folkloric accounts of lamiae, strigae, and incubi predate the Christian era and continued to haunt the European imagination throughout the Middle Ages, when vampirism was generally associated with witchcraft. But early in...
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Keeping Asheville Weird
On this Friday evening, the Drum Circle has formed in Pritchard Park. The drummers, many of them on the downhill side of 40, follow the lead of a tall black man standing before them. The music is primitive and repetitious, like the drumming in one of the old Tarzan flicks. In front of the drummers...
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Ayn the Antichrist
“If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom He gives it.” —Maurice Baring “Who is John Galt?” again rings throughout the land. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s doorstop novel chronicling a general strike of the productive against the “looters,” gains resonance during times of...
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Ron Paul, Now and Then
People don’t usually get more radical as they get older; it’s almost always the reverse. And the successful politicians were never radical to begin with. The one exception to this rule is Ron Paul. Ron has been around a long time. The 75-year-old 11-term U.S. representative from Texas ran for president on the Libertarian Party...
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Wisdom and Science
Societies live by their mythologies, which become so passionately held that it’s usually risky to challenge them. Having said that, one major component of contemporary secularist mythology really has to be confronted, because it is so influential, so widely reflected in even the saner mass media, and so totally wrong. I’m referring to the familiar...
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Here Comes the Parade
This past summer, a headline appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal: “Kentucky terrorist arrests shouldn’t jeopardize refugee program, advocates say.” The first paragraph ran: “As U.S. authorities recheck intelligence gathered on refugees, resettlement agencies say the arrest of two suspected Iraqi terrorists in Kentucky should not jeopardize programs that have helped tens of thousands of persecuted...