My Sicilian friend Manlio has something in him of the late Curtis Cate, who was a mutual friend of mine and Tom Fleming’s and a frequent contributor to these pages. When Curtis died in 2006 aged 82, I did not think to write an obituary. For some reason, one whose perennial argument with the heart...
Month: September 2014
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A Just and Honest Man
In its almost 60 years, much has been written about National Review, especially about those present at its creation. Most attention, of course, has been given to founder William F. Buckley, Jr., but others there at the beginning, such as James Burnham and Frank Meyer, have not been neglected. Yet no one, until now, has...
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(Not) The Age of Aquarius
I may be stereotyping Chronicles readers unfairly, but I suspect that not many read witches&pagans. If your subscription has lapsed, I draw your attention to a recent feature that actually has far-reaching consequences for more mainstream believers of all kinds. In an interview, well-known pagan author Diana L. Paxson complained that The generation that founded...
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Confiscating Liberty
I first came upon Stephen P. Halbrook in 1984 when the University of New Mexico Press published his first book,That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right. Since Halbrook had both a Ph.D. in philosophy and a law degree, my expectations were high. I was not disappointed. Moreover, by the time I...
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Strategic Blunders
It has been a summer of major strategic blunders by the United States and Russia over Ukraine and by the United States in the Middle East, where the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, now renamed simply the Islamic Caliphate) has emerged as a major player, threatening what little remains of the region’s stability....
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Achtung, Spooks!
Boo to the CIA! It got caught spying on Germany, and its top man in Berlin has been sent home. What I’d like to know is what’s so important about Berlin’s open-book policies that we had to play dirty? Maybe our ex-top man in the German capital should now concentrate on weeding out Israeli spies...
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Thinking Outside the Boxes
And the people in the houses All went to the university Where they were put in boxes And they came out all the same . . . In “Little Boxes” Malvina Reynolds was protesting against the conformity of the 1950’s, when core requirements and a limited number of majors still ensured some measure of common...
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Spooking the Left’s Hobby Horse
Based on reactions from the political left to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., one would think that American women have been stripped of fundamental constitutional protections. Gone are the franchise, free speech, and the right to serve on a jury. The Washington Post’s blog averred that the “Hobby Lobby case is an attack on...
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Not Crazy
In “Borderlines, Part 2” (News, June), Mr. Hugh Prysor-Jones takes on a great deal in covering a vast section of Europe. Apparently, his understanding of some of the background is, at least in some places, a bit shaky. To wit, he writes of “various Polish/Lithuanian empires.” There most certainly was a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which just...
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Not a Pro
There was a remarkable oversight in the otherwise wonderful piece by Eugene Girin (“Elena Chudinova: Telling the Truth,” Vital Signs, June) on the work of the Russian novelist, when the author states that Madam Chudinova wrote her royalist novel to counteract the “pro-Jacobin novels of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac.” Balzac never wrote any...
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Foreigners No More
They are coming: on trains, on buses, on foot, all the way from Central America, where they meet up with smugglers who take them across our nonexistent border. This has been happening for decades, but there’s one big difference in the recent wave of illegal immigration: These are children, many under ten years of age—50,000...
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Anniversary of Lies
August 10 marked the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which Congress had passed three days earlier. The resolution gave a green light to the Vietnam War’s “escalation,” what in today’s Pentagonese is called a “surge.” In March 1965, two Battalion Landing Teams of the 9th Marine Expeditionary...
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The Silence of the Gila
The mystery of brightness is more profound than the mystery of darkness, and that of stillness perhaps the most profound of all. In the noontime glare the heart of the Gila wilderness in southwestern New Mexico is both bright and still, the sole sound the drone of a circling horsefly, the only breath the imperceptible...
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A Very American Hotel
Forty years is a long enough stretch, but it seems far less than half a lifetime ago when, as a surly British teenager, I found myself clutching an all-day pass to the 1974 World’s Fair in Spokane, Washington. I was there on my summer vacation from Cambridge, and it seemed to me an almost satirically...
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Decline and Fall
I am very far from original in noticing similarities in the histories of Rome and America—republics that became empires. The decline and fall of the former has often been thought to foretell the fate of the latter. A Frenchman some years ago wrote a fairly convincing book called The Coming Caesars. Such analogies are interesting...
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An Interwar Odyssey
In 2011, Patrick Leigh Fermor became Patrick Leigh Former, and hundreds of thousands of devotees were doubly bereft. The first loss was the man himself, at 96 an antique in his own right, one of the last links to what feels increasingly like an antediluvian Europe, in which advanced civilization could coexist with medieval color...
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The End of the United Kingdom?
Of course Scotland won’t leave the United Kingdom. That was the conventional wisdom when the referendum on Scottish independence was announced two years ago. But today no one is quite certain what the outcome will be. The referendum is scheduled for September 18, and polls indicate that a majority of Scots favor staying in the...
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The Left’s Long March
On June 2, FOX News’s The Five were discussing the Harvard commencement speech of ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which he pointed out that something like 95 percent of the faculty had supported Obama. Their discussion ended with Bob Beckel, the program’s voice from the left, wondering why so few conservatives went into college teaching, and...
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Class Allegories
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Produced by Chernin Entertainment Directed by Matt Reeves Screenplay by Mark Bomback and Rick Jaffa Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Snowpiercer Produced by Opus Pictures Directed by Bong Joon-ho Screenplay by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson Distributed by The Weinstein Company As titles go, Dawn of...
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Conservative Education: Caveat Emptor!
Much of the blame for the deplorable state of higher education in America today must be traced back to the baneful influence of America’s most revolutionary educationist, John Dewey. In his enormously influential Democracy and Education (1915), Dewey defined education as “a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims.” In...
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Subgroup Strife in the Golden State
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. We were all going to “get along” in a diverse, multicultural paradise, led by our brilliant universities. But in a pattern sure to spread across America, the ethnic strife in California is increasing, not decreasing, as the state becomes even more diverse. And public universities are at the...
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