And it came to pass that fear did grip all of the Swamp, from Foggy Bottom to DuPont Circle; and it did spread unto all of the region beyond the Potomac. For behold, Steve Bannon had come. Or, if we prefer not to use the familiar “Steve,” Stephen K. Bannon. The K must not be...
Month: April 2017
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The Gift of Limitations
When he was little, Rick Curry was the first of his friends to tie his own laces. That may not seem like such a big deal unless you know that he was born without a right forearm. He was brought up to believe he was completely normal. At six, Rick’s father sent him to an...
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Reading Huxley Between the Headlines
“Is it time to reread Brave New World?” asks the distinguished historian Anthony Beevor, in a recent article on Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. I think it is. Of the two great fictional casts into the future, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Huxley’s imaginative prophecies...
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The Sport You Aren’t Watching
Women’s sports lurch upon a troubled foundation. To throw like a girl is to fail on the grounds of athleticism, and not to throw like a girl is to fail on the grounds of girlism. Worse, the quest for equality cannot reconcile its dogmatic ideal with how its professed adherents live out their faith. If...
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Kit Carson
Though the mountain men were responsible for blazing nearly every trail to the Pacific Coast, discovering the natural wonders of the Trans-Mississippi West, and providing the muscle that fueled the fur trade—a major component of the American economy—few gained national recognition. An outstanding exception was Kit Carson. During the 1840’s and 50’s, John C. Frémont...
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The End and the Beginning
How many “final” books can one man write? For most men, the answer is one. John Lukacs is not most men, however. In early 2013, ISI Books released History and the Human Condition, a collection of previously published (though revised) material that the press declared to be “perhaps John Lukacs’s final word on the great...
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What the Editors Are Reading
About 20 years ago the late George Garrett, a professor of English and writing at the University of Virginia and a contributing editor to this magazine, told me an anecdote meant to illustrate the intellectual and social naiveté of students at one of the most prestigious schools in the country. After George requested his sophomore...
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Celebrity Politics
Throughout the Republican primaries and the 2016 general election, commentators regularly characterized Donald Trump’s campaign as the political equivalent of a reality show. References to Trump’s leading role on NBC’s The Apprentice were a dime a dozen. Some on the left, in fact, criticized the 24-hour news networks for providing Trump with the equivalent of...
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A Coup Most Foul
We have seen coups of sorts in Washington before, not that anyone one calls them that. (Remember JFK, Nixon.) The one against Trump is of a different order of magnitude. It had been plotted by the Deep State even before he was inaugurated. Significant power nodes had always refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of this...
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Fakebook News
Who was it who said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime? The answer is a Frenchman by the name of Balzac, known in his time as a pretty good novelist. Well, is stealing an idea and making untold billions as a result a great crime? I suppose if it were my idea...
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Of Familial Optimism
I was very pleased to see Dr. Carle Zimmerman’s Family and Civilization referenced in Allan Carlson’s “A City on a Hill—With Transgender Toilets?” (View, March). I discovered this book early last year and was amazed by its lessons. The rapid and unintelligent changes in our culture seem so absurd without the context of history, and...
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Considering Bannon
They liken him to Rasputin and Svengali: He’s the éminence grise of the Trump administration, the hard-line ideologue who represents and multiplies all the darkest impulses of that man in the Oval Office. But who is Steve Bannon, really? The New York Times, in a remarkably dishonest—even for them—piece implied that the President’s chief strategist...
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There Will Be Brahms
The subject of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D major (Op. 77) is fitting because we are talking about a work that is respected, which is one thing, but also loved, which is more. I had some special times with the Brahms Violin Concerto, even some special bad times, but I always come back to...
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Wrestling With God
In the prison yard, we’re told, men who sexually abuse children are given special attention, and not the favorable kind. In Euless, Texas, at a public school that bears the unlikely name Trinity, sexual abuse is a celebrated part of the program. In late February, every major newspaper carried the story of Mack Beggs, a...
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Ut Plures Sint
“I have prayed for you,” said Jesus to the apostles on the night before he died, “that you would be several, even as the Father and I are two.” For the Son, we are told, sees what the Father does, and then goes and does something else. And Saint Paul praised the church at Corinth,...
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What Do Liberals Want?
The agenda of the Democratic Party, of liberal politicians generally, including socialist-liberals like Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison, and of liberal academics and “intellectuals” is pretty clear from the record of Barack Obama’s two administrations and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which ran on that record. Not nearly so clear is what the demonstrators who have been...
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The New Class War
“When a culture of freedom becomes a cult of freedom, injustice, suffering, and social dysfunction get explained away as ‘choices.’” —R.R. Reno The burden of this important book by the editor of First Things is the need to restore genuine freedom to American society—and, by implication, Western society as a whole....
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Books in Brief
Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, by Nicole Hemmer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press; 320 pp., $34.95). This very readable and otherwise excellent book is a history of the first generation of what the author calls “media activists,” conservatives who refused to work for mainstream periodicals and broadcasters...
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The New Liberal Establishment
For many decades people—conservatives, especially—have understood the phrase the liberal establishment to mean the social, educational, and economic elite that sits atop the broader community of people who think, act, and vote liberal: the “limousine liberals,” in other words. “The liberal establishment” meant the liberals at the top of the social hierarchy who dominated their...
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Sicced on Citizens
Nowadays, the federal government is the closest thing many Americans have to a religion, with those employed by it regarding themselves as a priesthood. Blind faith, if not dependency, tends to take over from observation. But there are other likenesses: sanctimonious cardinals and government functionaries, grandiose department-cathedrals that suck up money from believer and infidel...
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The Mystery of Things
Near the end of Shakespeare’s King Lear, when all seems lost, Lear comforts his daughter Cordelia—like him, soon to die—by telling her that in prison they will contemplate “the mystery of things.” Both in this sense, and in another sense, the word mystery leads the reader into the heart of Dana Gioia’s poetry. In the...
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Bizarre Baroque
Like most Western children, I was reared partly on fairy tales. Presented in beautifully illustrated Ladybird books, these were as much a part of my early childhood as the house decor, encouraging me to read and arousing inchoate ideas of an ur-Europe of forlorn beauties, wandering princes, vindictive stepmothers, dangerous fruits, fabulous treasures, ravening beasts,...
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Good Country People
Loving Produced by Raindog Films Directed and written by Jeff Nichols Distributed by Focus Features Hacksaw Ridge Produced by Cross Creek Pictures Directed by Mel Gibson Screenplay by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight Distributed by Summit Entertainment I first learned about miscegenation in 1958. A student in my high-school religion class asked our teacher, Father...
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