Same-sex marriage still does not exist. Yes, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an opinion, 5-4, covering Obergefell v. Hodges and three other cases, which effectively makes “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. But five “justices” or 50 million Facebook “likes” cannot change what is woven into the fabric of creation. Of...
Month: August 2015
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The Third Great Awakening
California is showing the way forward for the aspiring authoritarians in our midst—and the drought is providing them with the perfect opportunity. The front page of my local rag, the Press-Democrat, ran a story by Washington Post writer Bob Kuznia, “State’s wealthy guzzling water,” which sported this lede: “Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents...
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The Worst Verse Since 1915
Exactly 50 years ago, T.S. Eliot died. Exactly 100 years ago, “Prufrock” appeared. What better moment, then, to perform the long-overdue public service of identifying the single worst poem to have been published during the last century? To name and shame? To award the IgNobel Prize for (Nominally Versified) Literature? A dirty job, but someone...
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#CallMeMilton
Like most individuals my age who have both X and Y chromosomes and a conventionally male sexual organ, I was assigned a specific identity at birth. I obviously had no choice in the matter, though I can hardly blame the delivery-room doctor or my parents, since, in those benighted days, even the most enlightened members...
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Laudato si
The release of Pope Francis’s second encyclical (and the first that can truly be called his alone, since Lumen fidei was essentially cowritten with his predecessor, Benedict XVI) was anticlimactic. By the time the final text was released on June 18, there seemed hardly any point in reading it, since FOX News and Rush Limbaugh...
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The Color of Money
In the midst of the uproar over the Confederate Battle Flag (America’s latest Two Minute Hate), an odd rumor began making the rounds on the internet. As far as I can tell, it began on InfoWars, the website of crank conspiracy theorist and talk-show host Alex Jones. As companies like eBay and Amazon began pulling...
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Bumpy BRICS Road
Until a year ago it had seemed that BRICS, the association of five emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was morphing from a loose economic alliance into a geopolitical force willing and able to challenge the global order. Its members’ potential to do so appeared impressive: They account for three billion people (two fifths...
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Dying With a Kardashian
For those who like to see their name in print, the Hiltons and Kardashians of this world, make sure that, when the man in the white suit visits you, you’re the only one he’s dropping in on. In fact, even if the white-suited gent visits you within a day or two of having called upon...
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Mapping Verona
A map of Verona is open, the small strange city; With its river running round and through, it is river-embraced, And over this city for a whole long winter season, Through streets on a map, my thoughts have hovered and paced. I still wake up some nights, thinking about the streets of Verona and of...
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Power and Passports
In June, the Supreme Court greatly augmented executive power by holding that the president has the exclusive right to grant formal recognition to a foreign sovereign. This decision further pushes presidential power in the direction of royal prerogative through which monarchs enjoy the exclusive care over foreign affairs to the detriment of the people’s representatives....
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A Better World
I guess the misguided call it whining—the apparent conservative fixation on modern awfulness; on the disappearance of morals, manners, handwritten notes, and neckties, and the concomitant nonstop appearance of . . . shall we just leave it at H. Rodham Clinton? Thanks, I’ll do that. The misguided require guidance into a loftier understanding of the...
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Clash of Civilizations
I am a “liberal Democrat” who likes to read different perspectives on the many issues facing our country. I picked up Chronicles to read your article on Rolling Stone’s and Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s egregious misreporting (“UVA: Facts Versus the Left’s Narrative,” News, June), which I’m interested in as a UVA alumna and parent. When Mr....
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What the Editors Are Reading
The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times, by Brewster Chamberlain, just out from the University Press of Kansas, is one of those books that appears designed to turn a major literary career into a mere cottage industry. Nearly everything and anyone that could be related to Hemingway’s life and work, however distantly,...
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Getting Out of Bed With Korea
In some ways—even more than Japan and the People’s Republic of China—South Korea is dominating key U.S. markets. I’ve noticed this for years in Orange County, where Hyundai North America just built its new $200 million U.S. headquarters in Fountain Valley, the city next to where I live in Huntington Beach. It’s double the size...
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The Relevance of Russian Tradition
My first exposure to Alexander Dugin came via YouTube, when I discovered Vladimir Pozner’s 2014 interview with the controversial theorist. Marred somewhat by cultural relativism, Dugin’s critique of Anglo-American empire nonetheless contained more depth than a year’s supply of the Washington Post. Civilization cannot exist without a willingness to use lethal force on its behalf,...
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Life on the Frontier
The Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia enjoyed a full 24 hours of resurgent infamy before Gay Day came and took it all away. Screaming and shrieking throughout the process was the puerile, facile, and ultimately Manichaean Weltanschauung of our ruling class, which is best summarized in the phrase, “We are on the...
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Poetry’s Place in America
When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited London in 1868, he was invited by Queen Victoria to an audience at Windsor Castle. She complimented him on his poetry, assuring him that all her servants read it. Though Oscar Wilde took this phrase to be a rebuke of Longfellow’s vanity, why should it not be sincere? The claim...
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The Wellesley Zarathustra
“Laws [concerning ‘reproductive health’] have to be backed up with resources and political will and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.” Thus spake Zarathustra at the Women in the World Summit in New York City last April, an annual celebration of the Transvaluation of All Values. “Religious beliefs ....
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Beyond “Immigration”
The United States has Mexico, and below her Central America, south of the border. In ¡Adios, America!, Ann Coulter claims that 30 percent of the Mexican population, today over 122 million people, has moved to the United States within the past several decades. Directly south of the European Continent lies the continent of Africa, population...
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Two Flags
From the welter of democratic hysteria, illogic, historical ignorance, and political self-positioning and posturing, the eminently sensible remark by Tate Reeves, lieutenant governor of Mississippi, regarding the public display of the Confederate Battle Flag stands like a stone wall above the general confusion. “Flags and emblems,” Mr. Reeves said, “are chosen by a group of...
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Britain Decides
There’s something admirably old-fashioned about a British general election. Instead of the two years of incessant blather we get over here (“Just 11 weeks until the first GOP debate!” I heard recently on FOX News), the whole thing is over inside a month. The odds are good that nobody will call you in that period...
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Abolishing America
June was a depressing month for genuine conservatives. Apart from the Supremes putting their stamp of approval on ObamaCare, the horrifying murders of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, unleashed a jihad against the Confederate Battle Flag (Beltway “conservatives” piled on in support of the jihadists), while a majority of the robed Politburo found...
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A Watch in the Marches
“Oh, the wild hills of Wales, the land of old renown, and of wonder . . . ” —George Borrow, Wild Wales I step silent across the flagged floor below weathered slates and beams, sleep-held family breathing behind, the only other sounds the scratching of terriers’ claws as they push past...
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My Only Light
One of the things that James VI of Scotland liked about becoming James I of England—apart from the money—was that as head of the Church of England he would never be bossed about by a Scotch Calvinist minister again. Moreover, unlike his predecessor Elizabeth I, who never cared much for that aspect of her job,...
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Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Madame Bovary Produced by A Company Filmproduktions gesellschaft Screenplay by Felipe Marino and Sophie Barthes from Gustave Flaubert’s novel Directed by Sophie Barthes Distributed by Alchemy and Millennium Entertainment Gustave Flaubert was the satirist of dissatisfaction. His principal theme was the ruinous nature of unrealizable dreams, a malady he treated with cold contempt in his 1857 novel...
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Enter the Vandals
As everyone in America knows, on the night of June 17 Dylann Roof, armed with a .45 Glock, slaughtered nine black men and women in Charleston’s historic Emanuel AME church. Well before Roof was apprehended the following day, the mediasphere went ballistic. Hoping to start a “race war,” Roof generated instead what the Rev. Rep....
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Quiet, Please
Silence can be a bad thing if there is too much of it, but today that is not often the case, for we live in a noisy world. The postindustrial era promised to turn down the volume, but it didn’t—too often, we are ourselves directly responsible for a lot of noise. But not all of...
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