“A professor of engineering I knew, a specialist in reinforced concrete, was a man who showed me a great deal of kindness at what was obviously a difficult stage of my life. Construction is a prime mover of our region’s economy and the focus of all sorts of interests, not all of them benign, but...
Year: 2014
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Hollywood Plays with Fire
In July of 1870, King Wilhelm sent Foreign Minister Bismarck an account of his meeting with a French envoy who had demanded that the king renounce any Hohenzollern claim to the Spanish throne. Bismarck edited the report to make it appear the Frenchman had insulted the king, and that Wilhelm rudely dismissed him. The Ems...
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Christmas and New Year’s With Chronicles
For the last couple of years, this poor little Jewish boy (to paraphrase Taki) has a tradition. Every Christmas, I like to read a novella or a story (with a glass or two or three of spiced wine) that puts me into the holiday mood. Last year, it was the great Dickens’ A Christmas Carol,...
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Manlio on the Value of Introductions
“Apart from an eleventh-century Norman castle, my birthplace, latterly a town of some ten thousand inhabitants, is famous for having once had as many as a hundred churches in its precincts and for the way our people have with mutton. I had somehow lost track of the place, which I had left when still very...
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What the War on Cops Has Wrought
“NYPD, KKK, How many kids did you kill today?” That was one of the chants of anti-police protesters in New York City. Another was, “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!” Well, the marchers got their wish Saturday in Bedford-Stuyvesant when Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, firing into a patrol car, murdered...
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Chronicles cheer for Christmas 2014
This Christmas I’ve been trying to find some glimpses of good cheer in a country that for decades, as Tom Piatak, wrote earlier this month, is far more Pottersville than Bedford Falls, even under national Republicans. Maybe especially under national Republicans. But something we still have, if we can keep it, is freedom of religion...
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The Proofs of the Christmas Pudding
Bethlehem. Ah. Yes. There we were as a matter of fact, and not many weeks ago, either. Also at Nazareth. Also—of course—at Jerusalem, where everybody goes who goes to the Holy Land, with a sense of immense events and occasions to be taken in, the more so as Christmas draws near. I can say this...
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Moscow’s Weakness
“It is obvious that the elites of the West – U.S. government, the EU, NATO and the banking interests wish to overthrow Putin and his government and open Russia to ideological, economic and material exploitation,” a perceptive reader commented on my December 19 posting. “It is obvious that there are factions deep within the Russian...
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#HateWhitesBecauseOf ‘Privilege’
Listening to the racialist left complain about “white privilege” was bad enough before the cops killed hoodlums Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Now, it’s nearly insufferable. Consider three offerings—one from Salon, the second from President and Mrs. Obama and the third, a Twitter feed. Salon’s came from Brittney Cooper, a perpetually enraged black woman who...
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The Thin Blue Line Gets Thinner
Over the weekend, Ismaaiyl Brinsley murdered New York City policemen Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, after leaving messages stating he was going to take revenge for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner by killing “pigs.” Brinsley’s actions, of course, took place against the backdrop of a months long media campaign intended to convince...
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An Appeal from Thomas Fleming
Your mind is a terrible thing to waste—which is what will happen if Chronicles and its web go under because of lack of support. The election is over, and the Republicans have won their much predicted victory. It was only a matter of days before GOP legislators began to run away from the big issues:...
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Ukraine is a Long-Term Affair
In the latest issue of the Russian magazine Russkiy Mir (“Russian World,” December 10) our foreign affairs editor considers the implications of the crisis in Ukraine for Russia’s geostratigic position in the years to come. (Translated from Russian by the author) In Ukraine the United States presented Russia with its most serious challenge in the...
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Obama Throws Fidel a Rope
The celebrations in Havana and the sullen silence in Miami tell you all you need to know about who won this round with Castro’s Cuba. In JFK’s metaphor, Obama traded a horse for a rabbit. We got back Alan Gross before his Communist jailers killed him, along with an American spy, in exchange for three...
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Cuber Libre
It is a good thing Cuba is so insignificant a place, because if it had any importance—apart from its faded glories in the cigar industry—it would be an even more royal screw-up, for American foreign policy, than our disasters in Iran, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Egypt, and the Balkans. Here is my short history of Cuba since...
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Jeb!
I’m hoping Jeb Bush will run for president – because his guaranteed demise would be what I hope would be a fitting end to the Bush Dynasty. Earlier this month he said: “I kind of know how a Republican can win, whether it’s me or somebody else—and it has to be much more uplifting, much...
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Manlio on Conflict Resolution
“The problem with having a car is that one gets into accidents. However trifling, these may have unexpected consequences. “One bright winter day my bumper grazed a pedestrian, who promptly fell to the ground. I got out to make sure he was all right, which he said he was, but all the same I offered...
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The Rise of Putinism
“Abe tightens grip on power as Japanese shun election.” So ran the page one headline of the Financial Times on the victory of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Sunday’s elections. Abe is the most nationalistic leader of postwar Japan. He is rebooting nuclear power, building up Japan’s military, asserting her rights in territorial disputes with...
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Jonathan Gruber: Honest Liberal
Brought before a House inquisition, MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber burbled a recantation of his beliefs about how that triumph of liberalism had been achieved. Yet, something needs to be said in defense of Gruber. For while he groveled and confessed to the sin of arrogance, what this Ivy League con artist boasted...
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Torture and Fourth Generation War
Discussions on this week’s Senate report on the CIA and torture centered on two things: whether it’s moral. (It isn’t. Before 9/11, all Americans agreed on that.) And whether it worked to protect our country. The report said torture didn’t do any good. But former Vice President Dick Cheney charged the report was “full of...
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The GOP Chooses Pottersville, Again
Last night, John Boehner convinced 162 House Republicans to vote for a bill funding the federal government, with the exception of the Department of Homeland Security, through September. Boehner couldn’t convince 67 House Republicans to vote for the bill, but it passed the House, since the White House was able to convince 57 House Democrats...
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British Bread and Circuses
In the 1980’s my father wrote extensively of the distribution of mental resources in the West, comparing its patterns with those of the Soviet model. In my own turn I took up the subject in several newspaper articles, as well as a book, in the 1990’s. To my mind, frankly, it remains the question of...
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Eric Garner Case: The Score
Recently, the Big Burrito erupted into protests after Italian-American Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo was cleared by a grand jury of all criminal responsibility in the death of Black man Eric Garner who died after being allegedly held in a banned chokehold by Pantaleo during an attempt to restrain and arrest him. Protesters led and goaded...
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Russia’s Strategic Setback
President Putin’s announcement in Turkey last week that Russia was cancelling the $45bn South Stream gas pipeline project has caused havoc in southeastern Europe. Political leaders in the countries most adversely affected by this decision, Serbia and Hungary, have tried to keep a brave face, expressing hope that it may be revived some time in...
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Standard Practice
The human tempests presently sweeping the country—rape allegations at the University of Virginia and in the U.S. military, racial protests and rioting over police conduct, growing and growling bitterness during the sweetest of seasons—have as much to do with moral decay as with circumstances. A moral system presupposes some general level of personal restraint in...
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A Russophobic Rant From Congress
Hopefully, Russians realize that our House of Representatives often passes thunderous resolutions to pander to special interests, which have no bearing on the thinking or actions of the U.S. government. Last week, the House passed such a resolution 411-10. As ex-Rep. Ron Paul writes, House Resolution 758 is so “full of war propaganda that it...
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We’re Number Two!
Last week, Brett Arends of MarketWatch reported that, for the first time since Ulysses S. Grant sat in the White House, the United States no longer has the world’s largest economy. That honor now belongs to China. Recent International Monetary Fund figures show that China will produce 17.6 trillion dollars worth of goods and services...
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Racist Cops—or Liberal Slander?
We have found the new normal in America. If you are truly outraged by some action of police, prosecutors, grand juries, or courts, you can shut down the heart of a great city. Thursday night, thousands of “protesters” disrupted the annual Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, conducted a “lie-in” in Grand Central, blocked Times...
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Jeff Sessions Stands Up for Americans
There has been no better leader on the immigration issue on Capitol Hill than Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, who was just reelected without any opposition. Yesterday, Senator Sessions issued a powerful statement urging congressional Republicans to defund President Obama’s amnesty for illegal immigrants, an act that even Yale Law School Professor Peter Schuck, writing...
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…And a Little Hypocrisy
Detecting hypocrisy, among other faults, in the conduct of another is a perilous enterprise, as Christ reminds us in the allegory of the mote and the beam. It’s a bit like reprimanding somebody for bad manners, which is worse manners. And, not dissimilarly, finding impiety in a minister of the Gospel is, more often than...
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GOP Predictably Sells Out America
A month ago was a day before the Nov. 4 election. In this space I predicted, “GOP sellout strikes on Wednesday.” It wasn’t hard being Nostradamus. Here’s the latest. Quoting Mitt Romney, I said the GOP would give President Obama unconstitutional authority to negotiate a new trade deal, with Congress only having an “up or...
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Who Are the Cowards Now?
In July of 1967, after race riots gutted Newark and Detroit, requiring troops to put them down, LBJ appointed a commission to investigate what happened, and why. The Kerner Commission reported back that “white racism” was the cause of black riots. Liberals bought it. America did not. Richard Nixon said of the white racism charge...
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Why Christians Need the Classical Tradition
One of the most intriguing paradoxes of Dante’s Divine Comedy is the pervasive presence of pagan classical antiquity in what was meant to be (and is) Europe’s greatest Christian poem. Dante juxtaposes and interweaves classical and Christian, from Virgil’s appearance in the poem’s first canto to the homage to Aristotle (“the love that moves the...
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The Golden State’s Lavender Jacobins
You knew it would come to this. So did I. And yet one is still surprised by the sheer boldness of it all. From my local paper: California public schools do an inadequate job of teaching students about gay and lesbian history, despite a 2011 law that requires schools to teach such lessons, according to...
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Holy Ghosts and the Spirit of Christmas
It has been argued that, after Shakespeare, Charles Dickens is the finest writer in the English language. His works have forged their way into the canon to such a degree that it is much more difficult to know which of his novels to leave off the recommended reading list than it is to choose which...
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An Affirmative Action
The U.S. Supreme Court decision Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, issued last spring, upheld a 2006 citizen-approved ballot initiative in Michigan to amend the state constitution to ban reverse discrimination in public employment, contracting, and education, including at the University of Michigan. The ruling ends a quarter-century battle that began when David Jaye,...
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The Revolution That Isn’t
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 306 pp., $26.95 Conservatives have a love-hate relationship with technology. Although we often decry the effects of the usage of new technologies on societal traditions, it is conservative...
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Anarcho-Tyranny, Here and There
In recent decades, conflict within the broader conservative universe has witnessed the increasing marginalization of traditionalists, who consistently refuse to accommodate their detractors’ leftist ideological worldview. The camp that has been triumphant—so far—has generally been the one most willing to betray principle for temporary electoral convenience, as well as to sacrifice the loyalty of its...
Issue
December 2014
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Delivering the Goods
My local post office in suburban Seattle seems to be rigged to discourage customers these days. When you ask for the slightest bit of “consumer assistance”—as their cheerful mission statement on the wall promises they’re only too happy to provide—they seem to get ferociously cross. I was once read the riot act by a young...
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The Exceptional Rise of Boris Johnson
“I think Boris honestly sees it as churlish of us not to regard him as an exception—one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.” These words were written by a housemaster at Eton College about a young student named Boris Johnson. Today, over 30 years later, Johnson seems to...
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The Skull Beneath the Skin
Gone Girl Produced by New Regency Pictures Directed by David Fincher Screenplay by Gillian Flynn, from her novel Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox If only James Thurber were still with us. I’d love to hear him address Gone Girl, both Gillian Flynn’s novel and David Fincher’s film adaptation thereof. Why? Because the story trades on...
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It’s a Drag
That characteristic feature of our age, the impressively feckless adolescent indulged by a craven and cynical media, reared its head this past October 15 in the rural community of Randle, Washington. For reasons known only to themselves, the authorities at the 188-student White Pass High School invited their charges to attend class that particular morning...
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Dante’s Path to Heaven
Dante Alighieri died here in Ravenna, a little city where any sane man or woman might well choose to live and die. Like most people, I come here from time to time to stare stupidly at the Roman and Byzantine mosaics—though as the years go by I notice most people are letting their cameras and...
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4.0 and You’re Out!
When I was a junior at the Trinity School in New York, Mr. Clarence Bruner-Smith, head of the Upper School, assured me that I had an excellent chance of being accepted at Yale if I accepted the editorship of the school literary magazine. I thought that a ridiculous reason to be accepted anywhere, and that...
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We Need a Time Out
The Center for Immigration Studies recently issued two reports that show how transformative mass immigration has been in recent decades. The first study focused on the number of immigrants now living in the United States. Recent data from the Census Bureau show that 3.3 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, came to America between July...
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The Ice Storm
This morning, an icy December predawn, about 5:30, Oncor, our utility company, performed a miracle. I’m not sure if anyone actually said, “Let there be light!”; but for a certainty, there was light—and heat—and it was good. After more than 55 hours without electrical power, my wife and I, our three animals, and an array...
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A Question of Fairness
It all comes down to questions of fairness. On January 27, 2007, a journalist by the name of Peter Finn published in the Washington Post an interview with Ivan Tolstoy, a literary scholar distantly related to the famous writer. The subject of the interview was Tolstoy’s The Laundered Novel, a product of his ten-year investigation...
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Dante’s Human Comedy
Prima sedes a nemine iudicatur: “The First See is judged by no one.” Thus reads Canon 1404 of the current Code of Canon Law of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church, and Canon 1556 of the previous code. Romanus Pontifex a nemine iudicatur: “The Roman Pontiff is judged by no one.” That is Canon...
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Political Science
The ruckus over Ebola would be funny if the stakes weren’t so high. Here’s a disease that presents a lethal threat to the general public, but rather than addressing its danger on purely medical grounds, our officials and commentators are subjecting it to political calculation. Rush Limbaugh, for one, knows precisely who’s responsible for the...
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Waitin’ for The Robert E. Lee
The life of Lee having been “done,” redone, and perhaps even undone by revisionist treatment, the present weighty phenomenon requires some contextual examination. We might first and simply ask the question, What is the purpose of this book? I mean to say that the revisionist treatment of the so-called Civil War has been gathering force...