“[R]eligion is apt to provide another loyalty than that claimed by the State . . . ” —T.S. Eliot Two Muslims brutally murdered some French cartoonists for blaspheming their holy man. Have we learned something new from this? Yes, it turns out Muslims—the fundamentalist types, not many, but more than you’d...
Was the murder of 11 members of the staff of a French “satirical” magazine a civilized act? To ask that question even rhetorically seems absurd. Was the weekly output of the staff of that magazine a contribution to civilization? To ask that question seems brutish at best, and invites cries of “blaming the victim” and...
The claim propagated in the Western corporate media that the “March for Unity” in Paris on January 11 symbolized a victory of “freedom of speech” over “extremism” is wrong. The attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, and particularly the aftermath of those attacks, were a victory for militant Islam and a fresh sign...
I am not Charlie, nor will I ever be. Wearing a Je suis Charlie badge is one sure way of getting attention, but I will leave that to others. And another thing: Obscenity has no redeeming social value, and Charlie Hebdo was and is one long obscenity. But let’s start with that famous Parisian march...
A basic requirement of a wise and effective foreign policy is the ability to establish priorities and make tough choices. Unfortunately, U.S. officials seem increasingly incapable of accomplishing such a task. That grim reality is all too evident as the Obama administration drifts into confrontational relationships simultaneously with Russia and China. Even Henry Kissinger, hardly...
“Layze Ameeze de tayze ameeze sont mayze ameeze.” A drunken redneck recited this at me late one night in 1965, at Andy’s Lounge. Andy’s was one of Charleston’s last “blind tigers”—a speakeasy, complete with gambling and homely B-girls, that defied even the closing laws that the other scofflaw establishments observed. I went there often to...
American politicians love to pretend that they care about the middle class, because they know that the middle class generally determines who gets elected. But once elected, politicians tend to serve those who finance their campaigns, and the interests of large donors seldom align with those of middle-class Americans. This game has been played for...
Few jazz pianists are “accompanists” as gifted in knowledge, technique, and taste as Norman Simmons, able to back vocalists with consummate skill in chording, passing notes, and background lines, but also wise in the use of space. “A pianist is a piano player—that’s different from accompanying,” Simmons said recently, as he approached his 85th birthday. ...
Harvard’s Cass Sunstein recently complained that conservatives’ slippery-slope arguments about the left’s latest push to codify and enforce radical equality are intellectually “lazy.” Sunstein and his followers give the example of conservative opposition to gay marriage, which often includes the observation that “the Supreme Court shouldn’t force states to recognize same-sex marriages because, if it...
Like most “whose hearts pump Confederate blood,” Chilton Williamson, Jr., in lamenting the failure of Dixie’s attempt at secession (“The Revenge of the Confederacy,” What’s Wrong With the World, January), neglects to address the elephant in the bed. That critter is, of course, slavery, the “peculiar institution” at the core of what Williamson sees as...
It’s a Charlie Hebdo world—a place where “free speech” means the freedom to depict the Pope in drag with the caption “Ready for anything in order to win some clients?” Where “liberty” means crude drawings, of the sort one might see on a men’s room wall, showing the Holy Trinity in a series of sexual...
This collection harkens back to a bygone era when the essay was a common medium of the literary artist. As one can pick up a volume of essays by G.K. Chesterton or Hilaire Belloc nearly a century after their first publication and still be enthralled and enchanted by their freshness and continuing relevance, the same...
The terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo staffers provides an important opportunity for us to face a new reality: Fourth-Generation Warfare (4GW) has found a home in France, as well as in the rest of Western Europe and the United States. According to theorist William Lind, First-Generation Warfare involves massed manpower, such as the Napoleonic clashes;...
Sometimes one opens the morning newspaper and, instead of fires, floods, or declarations of war, finds a parable. This one hit me with the force of a subway train back in January, and I duly rushed it off as a post on the Chronicles blog, but stubbornly the retina refused to let go of the...
For the past six months the United States has been experiencing another of the racial fits that have recurred more or less regularly across the half-century since the civil-rights protests of the 1950’s and the Civil Rights Acts of the 60’s that abolished legally sanctioned segregation in this country. In this spasm, as in past...
Paris, January 7, 2015: Two men invoking Allah enter the office of a satirical magazine and shoot its staff, employees, and two policemen. Two days later, also in the name of Allah, a black killer opens fire on a kosher supermarket, bringing the total to 17 dead. A planetary uproar follows. Mourners, presidents gather in...
In 1833 James Fenimore Cooper returned from a European tour to Coopers town—founded by his father, one of the first pioneers into the dangerous frontier of New York beyond the Hudson Valley. Cooper property included a pretty peninsula on Lake Otsego that the family had allowed the community to use for fishing, picnics, and boating. ...
Muslim violence has returned to Paris, after nine years, with the murder of editorial-staff members of Charlie Hebdo. But the jihad of today looks different from the one that took place there in the fall of 2005. The previous jihadist was an aggressive and illiterate teenager with a baseball bat in one hand and a...
The centennial of that enormous calamity later known as World War I saw the release of about a dozen books on the subject. Catastrophe 1914, by Sir Max Hastings, one of the foremost British military historians writing today, is an exhaustive, one-volume history of that annus horribilis and the events leading up to the fatal...
Boyhood Produced and distributed by IFC Directed and written by Richard Linklater Richard Linklater’s Boyhood became the critics’ darling upon its staged release at the end of 2014. From The New Yorker to the Daily News, reviewers have vied with one another to sing its praises. Most of them think it’s a natural coming of...
Early in Owen Wister’s 1905 novel Lady Baltimore, the narrator, recently arrived in Charleston from Philadelphia, remarks upon the stillness of the city, its “silent verandas” and cloistered gardens behind their wrought iron gates—“this little city of oblivion . . . with its lavender and pressed shut memories . . . ” For Wister the...
Poetry has to me never been what I have so often heard called a problem, and that was so for the simplest of reasons: It was never presented to me as a problem until I was advanced in school, after which it was reformulated as a target of incomprehending odium by students whose insensibility had...
