On June 25, one day before the U.S. Supreme Court declared that a man can marry a man and a woman can marry a woman, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Louise Melling, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Miss Melling’s announcement that the ACLU would no longer support the...
Year: 2015
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What the Editors Are Reading
Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a...
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Beautiful Apologetics
Art and literature are powerful mediums to convey timeless truths. In the Introduction to Catholic Literary Giants, Joseph Pearce declares the power of art to evangelize, a defense of the Catholic Faith he terms the “apologetics of beauty.” He cites Dante, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Tolkien, and Waugh as a Catholic’s literary “weapons” to wield against the...
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Dining With The Donald
When Donald Trump started making noise about running for president, I knew next to nothing about him. Since I don’t watch television, I’m not sure whether I could even have identified him in a lineup. I knew only that he was a New York-based real-estate mogul and had a series of beautiful wives. So it...
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A Teacher of Doctrine
Last week I was busy preparing for the upcoming meeting of the John Randolph Club in Cleveland. But on Wednesday of that week, I came across an item promoting another event being held in Cleveland on the Friday the Randolph Club began that I knew I needed to attend. This event was a Mass to...
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Should We Fight for the Spratlys?
Trailed by two Chinese warships, the guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen sailed inside the 12-nautical-mile limit of Subi Reef, a man-made island China claims as her national territory. Beijing protested. Says China: Subi Reef and the Spratly Island chain, in a South China Sea that carries half of the world’s seaborne trade, are as much ours...
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Let Them Eat Platitudes
A friend recently sent me a piece by economic reporter Michael Snyder that provided more evidence of the decline of the American middle class. As Snyder notes, a recent report from the Social Security Administration shows that 51% of all American workers make less than $30,000 per year, and 38% make less than $20,000. These...
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Is the Pope Toying with Heresy?
Are Catholic truths immutable? Or can they change with the changing times? This is the deeper question behind the issues that convulsed the three-week synod on the family of the 250 Catholic bishops in Rome that ended Saturday. A year ago, German Cardinal Walter Kasper called on the church to change—to welcome homosexual couples, and...
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The Sad Fate of Jim Webb
With Jim Webb’s resignation from the presidential race goes a piece of history. Will a moderate to maybe-just-a-little-bit-conservative man—or woman—emerge ever again to offer Democrats a national leadership profile independent of the Hillary or Bernie template? You never know. But I don’t believe I would give long odds on it. Gone are the days when...
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Netanyahu, the Mufti and Hitler
Last Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu caused a stir when he told the World Zionist Congress that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, inspired Hitler to proceed with the mass murder of European Jews during the Second World War. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel...
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Can Trump Be Stopped?
Three months ago, this writer sent out a column entitled, “Could Trump Win?” meaning the Republican nomination. Today even the Trump deniers concede the possibility. And the emerging question has become: “Can Trump be stopped? And if so, where, and by whom?” Consider the catbird seat in which The Donald sits. An average of national...
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To End Wars—Trump vs. Sanders
Barack Obama sought as his legacy to bring an end to the two longest wars in U.S. history. On Oct. 15, he, again, admitted failure. The 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan will remain another year. And, on Inauguration Day 2017, 5,500 U.S. troops will still be there. Why cannot we leave? Because, if we do,...
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The MH17 Report: Caveat Emptor
Reports by various commissions of inquiry – national as well as international – into politically significant tragic events tend to be distorted by politics. The Dutch-led inquiry report into last year’s downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, released on October 13, is no exception. The British Lusitania Inquiry, chaired by Lord...
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A Few More Thoughts About Women In Combat
So we now learn that women might be drafted into the military. The news is a fitting coda to Tom Piatak’s post about women in combat, to which I added another. When I served on the first Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, conservative commissioners warned about this development: that...
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Don’t Take Your Guns to Town, Paul
The honor of it all aside, Rep. Paul Ryan would do well to decline the speakership of the House. For it is a poisoned chalice that is being offered to him. The Republican Party is not, as some commentators wail, in “chaos” today. It is in rebellion, in revolt, as it was in the early...
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The Allure of Mass Murder
“Seems the more people you kill, the more you are in the limelight.” That blog post on the email address of Oregon mass-murderer Christopher Harper-Mercer was made after Vester Lee Flanagan shot and killed that Roanoke TV reporter and her cameraman. “I have noticed,” said the blog post, “that people like [Flanagan] are all alone...
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Syria: No End Game in Sight
The Russian military intervention in Syria, and the creation of a new regional alliance which includes Iran and Iraq, removes one undesirable outcome from the complex equation. The collapse of the government in Damascus, and its replacement by some form of jihadist-dominated Sharia regime which would spell the end of the non-Sunni minorities (including Christians),...
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Our Mideast Fetish
Somewhere over the Atlantic, there is an Islamic militia that has proclaimed an Islamic state. It controls territory in several countries, has kidnapped and murdered many innocent people, including Christians, and openly professes its disdain for Western learning. Despite the undeniably barbarous nature of this militia, no American politician of note has advocated using American...
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War Party Targets Putin and Assad
Having established a base on the Syrian coast, Vladimir Putin last week began air strikes on ISIS and other rebel forces seeking to overthrow Bashar Assad. A longtime ally of Syria, Russia wants to preserve its toehold on the Mediterranean, help Assad repel the threat, and keep the Islamic terrorists out of Damascus. Russia is...
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The Mind of Mr. Putin
“Do you realize now what you have done?” So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us. Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are...
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What the Editors Are Reading
In my youth I must have read nearly every word H.L. Mencken wrote—The American Language excepted, though I did dip into it from time to time before setting the book aside as being dry as the Sahara. A couple of weeks ago I ran into almost the entire set (the successive Supplements and Editions) at...
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The Curtain Descends; Everything Ends
Phoenix Produced by Schramm Film Koerner & Weber and Bayerische Rundfunk Directed and written by Christian Petzold Distributed by Sundance Selects The Gift Produced by Blue-Tongue Films and Blumhouse Productions Directed and written by Joel Edgerton Distributed by STX Entertainment and Showtime Networks German director Christian Petzold’s new film, Phoenix, begins with a perfectly dark...
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The Poet: Companion of the Common Man
What is the role of the poet in society? In a frequently misunderstood remark, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in “A Defence of Poetry” (1821) that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Shelley’s idea is that poets shape our view of ourselves and the world, which in turn shapes the very course of history...
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The New Nationalism
During her short imprisonment for contempt of court, Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused on religious grounds to issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples, was compared with (among others) Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John C. Calhoun, Saint Paul, and even Jesus Christ Himself. Setting aside the propriety of...
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Disenchanted With Globalism
The political story this year was supposed to be a familiar one: A member of the Bush family was going to begin a successful march to the Republican nomination, and a member of the Clinton family was going to do the same thing on the Democratic side. Through June 30, Jeb Bush had raised $114.1...
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Burning Bright in the Darkness
I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. To discover, at his memorial service, that Dr. John Addison Howard’s favorite verse of Scripture was Philippians 4:11 came as no surprise to anyone who knew him well. Those who had simply met him once or twice, or never...
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The Union as It Was
A minority on the left is possibly willing to admit that a few “good Southerners” during the War Between the States opposed slavery, secession, and the Confederacy. Probably a much smaller minority would concede that a considerable number of Northerners opposed the war either to preserve the Union or to free the slaves. That, in...
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Ploys of Summer
When Summer of Blood 2015 came to a close, 3,702 people had been killed in the United States by people wielding guns. That’s according to a website called Mass Shooting Tracker, a left-wing “crowdsourced” collective dedicated to reporting every single incident of “gun violence” and to using phrases like “gun violence” and “killed by guns.” ...
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Two Experiments
It is a commonplace among American conservatives that, at some point in the past, the way Americans understood their constitutional and cultural tradition diverged from the reality of the constitutional order established in 1787. For the Southern Agrarians and their intellectual descendants, the great change occurred with the Civil War, which elevated “union” over the...
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Conservatives and the Gay Agenda
“The average American watches over seven hours of television daily. Those hours open up a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan Horse might be passed.” —Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, “The Overhauling of Straight America” (1987) If one had not already been convinced that the gay-rights...
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Wrecking Ball
Donald Trump has upended the GOP presidential primary process and turned it into the most entertaining reality show yet. If The Donald’s road to the White House is blocked—either by the Republican elites or by his own tendency to go too far—and he returns to TV land, he’ll have a hard time topping this one....
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How Long Has This Been Going On?
We live in revolutionary times of rapid technological change, and yes, it is a little disconcerting when the rules morph and the practices mutate. But I did predict years ago that vinyl would be back, and so it is. This year’s junque is next year’s antique. And I remember back even to Before Vinyl. A...
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Kennedy v. Kennedy
On the last day of August, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found for March for Life in its suit against the Department of Health and Human Services, among other agencies. March for Life is a secular, nonprofit organization, founded after Roe v. Wade, that opposes abortion...
Issue
October 2015
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Europe’s Ongoing Demise
“The Third Muslim Invasion of Europe is entering its mature stage by sea,” I observed in these pages in June, as thousands of Middle Eastern and African illegal immigrants sailed from Libya to Italy day after day. In the intervening four months, in a dramatic development, a new southeastern land route was stormed by a...
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Immigration: The Greatest Government Failure of Our Times
Migration is a reality that concerns no more than 200 million people on earth now living outside their country of origin—that is, only three percent of the world’s population. Why should we even talk about it? The reason is simple: Global statistics are worthless; the whole phenomenon is concentrated in Europe and the United States. ...
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The Future of Europe
When the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski, defeated the Ottoman army at the Siege of Vienna in 1683, that army of 23,000 soldiers did not have scores or hundreds of thousands of hungry and desperate civilians at its back, hoping to find a new life in Europe. The Ottomans were attempting a military invasion of...
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Mechanical Nihilism
This is a book about life in a society from which higher goods have been expelled, leaving no place for love, wonder, or beauty. The “compulsion” of the title is that which guides people in such a setting. In default of anything better, people fall under the dominion of itches, obsessions, and impositions, and mistake...
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John Addison Howard, 1921-2015: A Remembrance
John Howard, founder of The Rockford Institute (publisher of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture), passed from this world on August 7, 2015, a week shy of his 94th birthday. He is survived by his wife, four children, and nine grandchildren. A memorial service in his honor was held on August 29 at Westminster Presbyterian...
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More Than an Inkling
“Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect, it is nonetheless true that biographers often betray their subjects with either a kiss or a curse, and that the kiss is sometimes more deadly than the curse. ...
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I Heart Big Brother
Ashley Madison, the adultery website seemingly named for Honey Boo Boo’s fiercest rival, unwillingly yielded all of her secrets to the prying eyes of a hacker group that calls itself The Impact Team. At midsummer, the Team informed Ashley Madison’s parent company, Avid Life Media, that they would release all of the immoral website’s data—“all...
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Russia Enters the Fray: The New Syrian Score
Srdja Trifkovic’s live RTTV interview, Sept. 30, 09:09 GMT It will no longer be possible in the new setup – with the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Syrians and the Russians sharing intelligence – for the Gulf monarchies and for Erdogan to get away with the duplicity of pretending to fight ISIS while pursuing their separate...
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Exceptional America
Tocqueville was the first author to apply the adjective exceptional to America, but the compliment—if he meant it as a compliment—was a backhanded one, referring narrowly to circumstances that “concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical pursuits.” Certainly, he had nothing in mind comparable to the notion of “American exceptionalism” that...
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Table Talk
“Quiet, Please,” by James O. Tate (The Music Column, August), was, like all his writing, excellent. I learned much, especially when he concentrates on providing historical and cultural knowledge. His formulation of how the internet can be of great help to those who already have an historical and literary formation, but overwhelming and even nefarious...
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How to Keep From Getting Deported
In September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that an illegal alien, although properly found to be a danger to the community, should not be removed from the United States because he considers himself to be a transgender woman. Finding that Mexico is not in the progressive vanguard in embracing transgender identity, the court...
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The Left’s True Target
Arguments, as Malcolm Muggeridge astutely observed, are never about what they’re about. As when “You’re never on time anymore” turns out really to mean, “When are you going to quit sitting around and get a real job?” And so on. The national argument over Confederate symbols and monuments—assuming you want to call it an argument...
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Nuclear Baksheesh
For several months Republicans and Democrats have been jawing over the nuclear “deal” with Iran. Unlike so many partisan debates, this one may actually involve issues of national security, but only if both sides are serious. The Iranians have legitimate reasons to be afraid of an American Empire that has destroyed Iraq; plunged Syria, Tunisia,...
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Browning Europe
With every passing day, Europe is turning browner and browner, the Old Continent being overrun by a tide of humanity not seen since the upheavals following World War II. Just think about it: 3,000 migrants from Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Niger, and Eritrea pass daily through the Balkans on their way to Germany, France, Austria, and...
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A Particular Facet of God’s Design
Last week, the European Union voted to require members to accept a portion of the migrants who have been coming into Europe over the Mediterranean and through the Balkans. Four states voted no—Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Romania—and both Hungary and Slovakia say that they will fight the mandate to accept migrants in the...
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Pope’s World and the Real World
Pope Francis’s four-day visit to the United States was by any measure a personal and political triumph. The crowds were immense, and coverage of the Holy Father on television and in the print press swamped the state visit of Xi Jinping, the leader of the world’s second-greatest power. But how enduring, and how relevant, was...