The timing of Omar Mateen’s shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub was rotten for the Obama administration, because Secretary of State John Kerry had just published his carefully worded Joint Strategy on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), in which the word religion or religious appears nine times, but Islam, Islamist, and Muslim appear nary a-once. The administration’s...
Month: August 2016
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Abridging Omar
Attorney General Loretta Lynch attempted to censor the three 911 calls Omar Mateen made as he was slaughtering his 49 victims at an Orlando nightclub. All references to Islam and the Islamic State—to which he pledged allegiance as he was slaughtering his victims—were initially scrubbed. “What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this...
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The Romantic Tory
President Nixon lamented in 1969 to his urban-affairs advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that there was a dearth of poetry in the White House and had the former professor draw up a list of books for him to read. Nixon soon became enthralled with the 1966 classic biography of Disraeli by Robert Blake. The book was...
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Survivors and Liars
Lauren Stratford might be called the woman who never was, or rather the woman whose existence we dare not admit. Even the soberest retelling of her fantastic story makes nonsense of so many contemporary assumptions and pieties. Over the last generation, ideas about child abuse have grown to the status of social orthodoxy in the...
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An Aroused Populace—With Guns
At the Pulse nightclub on June 16, Omar Seddique Mateen, a Muslim on his own personal jihad, opened fire on the crowd of more than 300. No one shot back. Some tried to hide in the bathrooms. One of those in a bathroom texted his mother, “He’s coming. I’m gonna die.” He was right. Mateen...
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Islam, Period
“The beginning of wisdom,” Confucius said, “is to call things by their proper name.” Donald Trump’s aphorisms are unlikely to make their way into fortune cookies, much less to go down in history, but on this point he and the great Chinese sage would seem to agree. In the wake of Omar Mateen’s massacre of...
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Supremely Uninterested
In every presidential election since 1992, complaints about subpar Republican candidates (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney: The names speak for themselves) have been met with a common refrain: This is the most important election in our lifetime, because of the Supreme Court! Hold your nose and vote for...
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Abortion’s Triple Crown
For four decades now, pro-life voters have been wedded to the national Republican Party by the vows of politicians whose actions, upon election, have proved that they had no intention ever of fulfilling them. Every two or four or six years, they would swear to defend the lives of the unborn, and then, after taking...
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England’s Independence Day
The Brexit referendum of June 23 was a momentous event, comparable in long-term implications to the fall of the Berlin Wall a generation ago. It laid bare the yawning gap between the London-based political machine and the alienated and angry majority of “left-behind” citizens. Thanks to outgoing prime minister David Cameron’s miscalculation, the masses seized...
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Playing Games With “Islam”
Dancing around an unpleasant reality is what politics is all about nowadays—Donald Trump excluded—with political correctness the enveloping cloud that hides truth and the facts. There are boundaries that are set by those faceless gray men and women none of us ever see, those who control the networks, the newspapers, and the academy—in other words,...
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Tunnel of Love
As both a fellow conservative and a fellow fan of Bruce Springsteen, I read with interest Scott P. Richert’s June column, “The Ties That Bind” (The Rockford Files), which is at once a loving tribute and a sad goodbye to “The Boss”—the latter because of Springsteen’s recent decision to cancel a concert in North Carolina...
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Like a Snowball
Merle Haggard: truancy, auto theft, robbery, drug problems, prison in San Quentin, five-times married—all of this, according to your three writers in the June issue (Wayne Allensworth, Roger D. McGrath, Aaron D. Wolf). Talented musician? Yes. “Merle Haggard: A Conservative American”? When? I suggest you check the definitions of conservative and sociopath. I think I...
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A Reluctant Revolutionary
Wendell Berry is a Democrat, pacifist, and critic of organized religion. Add to this the fact that he is a writer whose work has proved compelling to many conservatives, and he becomes a bit mysterious. At times Berry himself has seemed somewhat bemused by the cultural conservatives who frequently promote his work. Once we consider...
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Earning Your Protest
Like many young men graduating high school in 1966, my father took a fast track to the politically seething, war-shattered jungles of a small country on the other side of the world. He had no middle name, no college degree (nor any aspirations of pursuing one), five siblings, and no “rich dad” culture to be...
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The Racists and the Flag
The Southern Baptist Convention finally had its Appomattox, surrendering the flag of its ancestors at its annual meeting of messengers (representative delegates) held in mid-June in St. Louis. Reportedly, an overwhelming majority of messengers voted in favor of Resolution 7, in which they determined to “call our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the...
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Tocqueville, Santayana, and Donald Trump
“To be an American,” George Santayana said, “is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.” For Americans and non-Americans alike, the American people has seemed a recognizable and describable breed from the earliest years of the Republic down to the 21st century, despite America’s reputation as a nation hospitable to immigration...
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What the Editors Are Reading
About once a year I return to the works of my old friend Edward Abbey, the Jeffersonian environmentalist, who died in 1989 at the age of 62. Unlike the modern environmentalist, who is typically an urban chair-sitter, fundraiser, and postdemocratic politician, Ed Abbey was the real thing as well as a fine writer, competent equally...
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Books in Brief
The Life of Louis XVI, by John Hardman (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 499 pp., $29.00). This sympathetic, indeed deeply moving, biography of the ill-fated king is dramatic and mostly well written, save in certain instances where I found the presentation of particular events (such as the controversy at the immediate start...
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Now There Will Always Be an England
The tenor—and temper—of the debate leading up to the British referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership in the European Union on June 23 hardly suggested the rhetorical and emotional violence of the response by the proponents of Remain to their substantial defeat by a margin of 52 to 48—a figure some of them pounced...
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Openings and Closings
Raphael Israeli examines one of the most difficult political problems of our time: The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He approaches the subject by presenting and analyzing research on the conflict by earlier Israeli historians (the so-called Old Historians), by more recent Israeli historians (the so-called New Historians who coined the label Old...
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An Englishman in His Near Abroad
Samuel Johnson was nearly 64 when he made an unexpected journey. One day in 1773, the internationally renowned lexicographer, essayist, poet, and novelist, who somehow combined being one of the great thinkers of Europe with being a personification of bluff Englishness, suddenly switched his great gaze north, in search of a dream of youth. His...
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Under Circe’s Spell
Love and Friendship Produced by Westerly Films Written and directed by Whit Stillman from Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Distributed by Roadside Attractions and Amazon Studios Whit Stillman’s new film, Love and Friendship, is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan, an early and somewhat unfinished work she wrote when she was all of...
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Beyond Populism
Donald Trump’s political success dramatizes the nature of today’s politics. On one side we have denationalized ruling elites with absolute faith in their own outlook and very little concern for Americans as Americans. On the other we have an increasingly incoherent and corrupted populace that nonetheless retains for the most part the basic political virtue...
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Get in Deep
Although music doesn’t have an obvious link with golf, I say it does, so that I can contradict myself immediately. The late Sam Snead was and still is well known for his beautiful swing, which he related explicitly to waltz-time, and more than once. Tempo and rhythm were aspects of motion, as he saw the...
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Faulkner in Japan: The “American Century”
In August of 1955, William Faulkner traveled to Japan. Based in the out-of-the-way mountain province of Nagano—which, until the 1998 Winter Olympics, enjoyed a benign anonymity in perfect proportion to its relative unimportance in world affairs—Faulkner lectured and temple-toured for two weeks, doing the bidding of the U.S. State Department, which had sponsored his trip. ...
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