My great-grandparents loved music. When I look through old sepia-toned pictures from hog-killing day—here’s one of my great-uncles dangling a fat pig into a 55-gallon caldron of boiling water—I always see a guitar or two in the background. The natural rhythms of life, of the year, were marked by celebrations. There were luxury items to...
Month: June 2016
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Britain in the Mediterranean
A visit to Cyprus helps to dispel the myth that the British Empire died of natural causes half a century ago. It did nothing of the sort. The empire rebranded itself as the Commonwealth of Nations, and carried on much as before. The Commonwealth countries—53 in all, including two, Rwanda and Mozambique, that were never...
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The Okie From Oildale
A boyhood pastime when I was growing up was building radios. We did it in Cub Scouts and again, at a more sophisticated level, in Boy Scouts. Various kits were available, but we all started with a simple crystal set. It seemed almost magical that with a few components, essentially wire and a crystal, and...
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The Ties That Bind
I bought my wife tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert for Christmas. This may sound like the stereotypical man-gift—a present a husband bestows on his long-suffering spouse because he wants it for himself, like a riding lawn mower—but Amy really did want to see The Boss in concert again. Twenty-eight years ago, in our sophomore...
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What the Editors Are Reading
A recent story in the British press about Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, the English author, journalist, and broadcaster, in retirement at the age of 92, prompted me to order one of his books, Democracy Needs Aristocracy, first published in 2004. It is an excellent work, and one I wish I’d consulted when I was working up...
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Sometimes a Flower
A substitute teacher in a public school in what is, by today’s standards, still a relatively socially conservative part of the country uses “an anatomical word during a teaching lesson.” She is fired, and the story goes viral. Just another battle in the never-ending culture war, right? Yes—but not in the way you might think....
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Trump’s Global Vision
On April 27, Donald Trump gave a long speech on foreign policy. It was his first attempt to present his views on world affairs in detail. Refreshingly, it contained no reference to promoting freedom, democracy, and “human rights”; confronting tyranny and evil; or making the world a better place in the image of the exceptional...
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Regrettable Regrets
E.M. Forster infamously said that, if he had to betray his country or a friend, he hoped he would betray the former. He was cheered for it by Oxford swells who had seen their elders slaughtered in the trenches during World War I, and by fellow homosexuals whose proclivities were illegal at the time. This...
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The Saudi-Iranian Blood Feud
Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which have frequently flared over the years, reached full intensity this winter when the Saudi government executed 47 regime opponents, including the prominent Shi’ite cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Immediately, there were riots in Iran directed against Saudi targets, culminating in the burning of the Saudi embassy—an incident that even Iran’s...
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Sing Me Back Home
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make all my memories come alive Take me away and turn back the years Sing me back home before I die Merle Haggard was a real American. At its best, his music was folk art, Americana poetry, each song capturing a snapshot of his...
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Reflections on Chronicles
The March issue (“Against Ideology”) was a brilliantly perceptive one, notably as it stresses the utmost importance, for any true conservative, of defending loyalties to local mores and traditions, small hometowns and family farms, regional cultures—things that have passed the test of time and matter most to real people. With such ideas I could not...
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Written on the Subway Walls
In his March Correspondence, “EMP (‘Are You Experienced?’),” Christopher Sandford asks if rock music is truly an art. The Oxford Dictionary defines the arts as “various branches of creative activity such as painting, music, literature and dance.” The answer, therefore, is an obvious yes. So what is Mr. Sandford really getting at? He claims some...
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Leaping Short
Martin Hacklett is English. He lives in London. His father, who used to work on the Thames, has been unemployed for 15 years. His elder brother has been in and out of prison. School consisted of the usual encounters with bullies and institutional indifference, and now he’s working as a bicycle courier, weaving his way...
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The Right Reborn
The stunning success of the Trump campaign has upended what has passed for conservatism lo these many years and opened up new vistas for the American Right. Many if not most readers are familiar with the story of how the neoconservatives emigrated from the far left and colonized the conservative movement, hijacking what had been...
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Student and Teacher Benefits
It’s nine o’clock on Tuesday. First into the classroom today are my Advanced Placement European History students. I begin the class, as I always do, with a prayer, and then deliver a lecture on such Enlightenment luminaries as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot. (Given the irreligious beliefs of these figures, the irony of prayer is not...
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Just Don’t Tell the Truth
Well, shootfire: That didn’t work. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) is against requiring women to register for Selective Service in our Brave New Military. Accordingly, he proposed an amendment to the 2017 defense-spending bill that accomplishes the opposite of what he believes. The idea, Hunter claimed, was that he didn’t want the executive branch to...
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Self, Secularism, and Suicide
The response of the Western European governments, and of a substantial portion of what is called the European elite—roughly speaking, the upper-middle classes—to the invasion of the Continent from the east and south must be among the most unusual and perverse spectacles in human history. For nearly a year now, the world has looked on...
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The New French Resistance
Philippe de Villiers, a French entrepreneur, politician, and author, belongs to what one might call the New French Resistance, a group of contemporary French patriots for whom Paris, not Vichy, symbolizes treason against both the French Republic and the historic French nation. Descended from an aristocratic family in the Vendée, Villiers is the founder and...
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Books in Brief
The English and Their History, by Robert Tombs (New York: Knopf; 1,024 pp., $45.00). This superb, and superbly readable, book is a model of historical writing for a general readership, outstanding for its concision, clarity, and even-handedness. The strong narrative component easily accommodates a tremendous amount of detail without ever becoming weighed down by it,...
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Trump and His Enemies
To the extent that a man may be judged by his enemies, Donald Trump is a very good man, indeed. And the more extended and successful his campaign becomes, the more it proves that everything he has ever said about the conjoined political and media establishments in America is spot on, beginning with his charge...
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An Essay on the State of France
What follows is not an anthropometric description of France, but neither does it reflect the fancy of the author: It is what one can see of France from a certain distance, which blurs the finer details but allows the main features to stand out. When looking at the Great Wall of China from a certain...
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“Pity Poor Bradford”
Bolling Hall has squatted on its plot since the 14th century, hunched against the wind and rain of the West Riding—a North Country architectural essay in dark yellow sandstone looking warily down a steep hillside onto Bradford’s Vale. Old though the building is, the estate’s foundations go deeper than Domesday, when Conqueror companion-in-arms Ilbert de...
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Shine Your Ever-Loving Light on Me
The Jungle Book Produced and distributed by Disney Pictures Directed by Jon Favreau Screenplay by Justin Marks from Rudyard Kipling’s book Midnight Special Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Written and directed by Jeff Nichols Are the Disney executives rethinking their political correctness? You know, their belief that homosexuals and transgender folk are uniformly good...
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The Declaration Now—and Then
In 1996, Barry Alan Shain published his Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought. It was a book that should have shaken professional conservatism to its foundations. At the time Patrick J. Buchanan was a standard-bearer for an America bound by a common cultural and religious tradition and was being resisted...
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The Mexicanization of North America
For nearly 200 years the United States and Mexico coexisted as a series of antonyms separated by a desert. The United States was prosperous and free. Mexico was poor and despotic. For a time, the United States was the preeminent middle-class society. Mexico has been a society of extremes. For most Americans, Mexico was a...
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A Monumental Proposal
I was recently perplexed to see in the news that Harvard, the oldest institution of higher learning in the nation, had declared that, though master has no etymological relation to slavery (but rather to magister), the word would nevertheless be abandoned as a title for a resident supervisor of student housing, and be replaced by...
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