Andrew Crocker did not attend his graduation exercises at Michigan State University in East Lansing on May 2. He was home dealing with family matters. So he missed the honorary doctorates. Shirley Weis, a graduate of MSU’s College of Nursing, received a doctorate of Science as the first woman and first non-physician to serve as...
Month: May 2014
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Worse Than Useless
Many a wise ancient employed allegory to elucidate meanings obscured by platitude, and so I thought, why not use the trick in this book review? The fact is, only the history of World War II is more densely populated with hacks than the history of the Russian “Revolution”—initial capital being part of that old scam—and...
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Moscow Rules
Spending the first three days of spring in snowy Moscow, especially after being in balmy Yalta and Sevastopol, is not my idea of fun. It is useful, however, when you write on foreign affairs and there’s a first-rate crisis under way between “Putin’s Russia” and the West. The overriding impression is that Moscow no longer...
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More Knee-Slappers
One of the great knee-slappers, however perverse, of the so-called War on Terror is the fact that fundamentalist Islamic forces are stronger than ever as a result. It is like going on a crash diet for a month and putting on 20 pounds. In the 12 years since George W. first uttered those three little...
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America’s Grand Strategy
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. “Robbing, slaughtering, pillaging they misname sovereign authority, and where they make an empty waste they call it peace.” Tacitus puts this accurate if one-sided summation of Roman imperial strategy into the mouth of Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain, urging the Celtic warriors to resist...
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Eugenio Corti, R.I.P.
With the death of Eugenio Corti on February 4, Italian literature has lost the last of its great masters. Born in 1921, Corti grew up in the rolling countryside south of Lago di Como known as the Brianza. His father was a textile manufacturer whose handsome brick factory in Besana had been converted into the...
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The Limits of Russophilia
Despite all the media attention devoted to it, Russia’s incursion into Ukraine poses no threat to the United States. Soviet Russia was a mortal threat to the United States because she embodied a communist ideology with aspirations of global hegemony. The threat died with that ideology, which is why Americans who believe that the goal...
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Picturing a Lesbian Wedding
Americans are getting a taste of unintended consequences from overly broad public-accommodation laws enacted in the past half-century. Christian business owners are especially burdened when individuals practicing what once was considered perversity are deemed “suspect classes” and are thus entitled to heightened legal protection. A prime example is Elane Photography v. Willock. Elane Photography is...
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Not What It Should Be
Yeah, it was a crisis—though few who, like the author, were sentient during the 50’s understood completely what was going on around us; viz., the erosion of the liberal intellectual order we had come, with notable encouragement, to take for granted. When I say “take for granted,” I mean just that. We had prayers before...
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Shameless Defenses
Congratulations to Taki for achieving what seemed to be impossible: transforming the effete, amoral boob FDR into a sympathetic figure (“Little Yellow Bastards,” Under the Black Flag, April). Taki’s celebration of early-to-mid-20th-century Japanese military traditions and the heroic unshackling of Japan’s economy from those nefarious usurers was understandable. His failure to mention other significant activities...
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The Past Isn’t Past
Is the past really a foreign country? Did they do things so differently then? Or is it that the past isn’t dead after all—and isn’t even past? In Washington, it is always 1939. But the Crimea isn’t the Sudetenland, and Vladimir Putin isn’t Hitler. No Blitzkrieg threatens Europe, or even Kiev. Then it’s the 1950’s,...
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From Castro to Cancun
I’ve long wanted to go to Cuba for the same reason that most Americans my age might. I wanted to see a place that has, for most of my life, been shrouded in mystery. It has been difficult for me to accept the idea that a country only 90 miles off our coast, home to...
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Botched Efforts
Judged on their own terms and with respect to the objectives of their own leading protagonists, medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity failed, but each in different ways and with different consequences, and each in ways that continue to remain important to the present. That is the author’s tactful...
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Russia’s Way Back
Liberalism’s Glorious Age of parliamentary democracy, nation building and national consolidation, free trade, and empire, of which Great Britain was the chief power and paramount symbol, reached a catastrophic close in 1914. After 1945, liberalism in renovated form attempted to launch a modern Glorious Age dominated by the Pax Americana and the United Nations and...
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True Tar-Heel Tales
Great Granddaddy Honeycutt and Teddy Roosevelt Children, I haven’t ever been on what you might call speakin’ terms with any presidents. But I have seen four or five of them from pretty near, and I want to tell you that they ain’t nothing special. They have to get out of bed in the mornin’ and...
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The Writer and the Lawyers
If there are two vocations more opposite than, on the one hand, the starving but gifted poet, mystery and horror-story writer, and prolific essayist and, on the other, the obscenely rich, ambulance-chasing attorney, this writer does not know them. Yet these two are conjoined at birth. To understand this, one must know something about the...
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The Brown Revolution: A Noxious Brew
The recent Brown Revolution in Ukraine, which saw the overthrow of the legitimate (if corrupt and bumbling) Yanukovych government, is a triumph of Western Ukrainian nationalism—an ideology characterized by a violent Russophobia and antisemitism. The rabid neo-Nazis of Oleh Tyahnybok’s Svoboda (“Freedom”) party and Dmytro Yarosh’s militant Right Sector are just the latest manifestation of...
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Of Pasteboard and Pastry
The Grand Budapest Hotel Produced by Scott Rudin Productions and Studio Babelsberg Directed and written by Wes Anderson Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Exceptionally well-made pastries are often said to be lighter than air. I was reminded of this after watching Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, a confection so airy that...
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Borderlines
On January 1, something like 20,000 people marched by torchlight through the center of Kiev to celebrate the 105th anniversary of the birth of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. Some of the older participants even wore their old uniforms from the Ukrainian National Army. In Western Ukraine, Bandera is regarded as the founder of...
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CPAC Moves to Rockford?
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: when the Conservative Political Action Conference moves its annual meeting from Washington, D.C., to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Or Murfreesboro. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. Conservatives flock from around the country to CPAC, expecting to advance...
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The World Upside Down
The hysterics are deafening: The “invasion” of Crimea has the pundits in an uproar, with the Krauthammers and Kristols and Kagans calling for a new cold war (verging on hot), and the “progressives” chiming in with calls for sanctions and making Vladimir Putin “pay a price,” as the President put it. Even some “libertarians” are...
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