In the Year of Our Lord 1878, on the sixth day of the sixth month of the year, was born to one Augustín Arango and his wife, Micaela Arambula, humble peasants on the Rancho de la Loyotada in Durango State, Republic of Mexico, a son, Doroteo, known to posterity as Francisco “Pancho” Villa: social bandit,...
Author: Chilton Williamson (Chilton Williamson)
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Synthetic Syntheses
Sam Francis’s most enduring, as well as trenchant, political insight may have been his perception of what he caustically described as “the unique achievement of the political genius of the modern era.” Francis dubbed this “anarcho-tyranny”—“a kind of Hegelian synthesis of two opposites,” he explained, in which the failure of the state to enforce protective...
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Two Trails to the Rainbow
It was in the spring of 1925 that a young Easterner named Clyde Kluckhohn, on sabbatical from Princeton to spend a year working on a cattle ranch near Ramah, New Mexico, first learned from a Zuñi Indian of the natural phenomenon called Nonne-zoche Not-se-lid (meaning “Rainbow of Stone”), standing at the very end of the...
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The Autodidact at Work and Play
Every writer is an autodidact, for reasons that are fairly obvious when you think about it. First, the business of writing (as distinguished from composition) cannot be taught but must be learned by imitation and by practice. And, second, unless he is a scholar, newspaper journalist, or technical-scientific writer, a writer must discover his proper...
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Dia de los Muertos
Fall had always been Héctor Villa’s least-favorite season. This year, as the days shortened and his cousin’s stayover in his home lengthened inexorably, he felt his substance as a householder drain away in exact proportion to the diminishing quantity of the pale indirect light. Four days after the shortest day of the year comes Christmas;...
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Play It Again, Plum!
“It has been well said of Bertram Wooster that though he may sink onto rustic benches and for a while give the impression of being licked into a custard, the old spirit will come surging back sooner or later.” —P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season Robert McCrum demurs from critical comparisons of P.G. Wodehouse with the...
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Guys of the Golden West
During the first half of the second-to-last decade of the 19th century, three young gentlemen traveled from their native region of the northeastern United States to the trans-Mississippi West, still a few years short in those days of the official closing of the American frontier. Though alike in being Ivy Leaguers, well-born, well-bred, and well-heeled,...
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The Dictator of the World
“E avanti a lui, tremava tutta Roma!” —Victorien Sardou, Luigi Illica, and Guiseppe Giacosa, Tosca At the time of its publication in 1984, John Lukacs’s Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century was recognized by discerning critics as a highly significant work combining a fresh originality, at once topical and...
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The Most Patriotic Conservative
I first encountered the name Samuel T. Francis in 1984, when Joe Sobran thrust a nondescript-looking little book, published in typically amateurish format by the University Press of America, into my hands and asked my permission to review it. (I was, in those days, the literary editor for National Review.) Its title was Power and...
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Reconquista de Villas
Héctor Villa was discovering the hard way that running afoul of the authorities in America is like riding a horse into quicksand, as Rodolfo Fierro, the Centaur’s chief executioner, had had the misfortune to do: You escape from the fatal mire only by miracle (something God had not seen fit to vouchsafe poor Fierro). For...
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Art, Democracy, Empire
Their effect is especially pervasive and pernicious in respect of empires, as Clyde Wilson has cogently noted. The American empire, at the opening of the 21st century, might be offered as Exhibit A. In the political sphere, corruption is engendered by the magnitude of the stakes contended for; in the economic realm, greed is stimulated...
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The Villas of New Mexico
“Hey, compadrito—bring the mail along with you when you come inside!” Héctor Villa shouted through the open window to Jesús Juárez, his friend, who was just letting himself into the yard by the front gate where the mailbox, painted red-white-and-blue, stood on a barbershop post. Héctor “Pancho” Villa was having a pleasant Saturday morning in...
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Night Vision
“I hear thunder,” Ivalene said in a puzzled voice, looking up to the blue sky stretched tight across the great canyon. “How could there be thunder?” Will Ford demanded. “There isn’t a cloud in sight. They must be blasting somewhere close by to here.” “So how could they be blasting, smart-ass?” she retorted. “Blasting isn’t...
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The Curse of Activism
Activist, activism: These are two of the ugliest, falsest, and most sinister words in the English language. As citizens of the Age of Activism, subject to the unremitting harassment of activists who refuse to leave society in peace, we need to understand the phenomenon they represent, as well as to recognize it. According to my...
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Proposition 200
Proposition 200, a measure requiring that applicants for state benefits and state suffrage show proof of eligibility for these privileges, was adopted in Arizona on November 2, 2004, by 56 percent of the total vote and 47 percent of the Hispanic portion of it. This happened in the face of opposition from the Democratic governor...
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Endings and Beginnings
The meadow sweeping from the treeline down to the lake below had turned yellow almost overnight, with purple patches of the frost-seared ground cover showing through. The lake surface was no longer a smooth reflection of the stony peaks, standing against the cold sky and dusted now with new snow, but an infinite series of...
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The Deserts of Nations
In “A Mirror for Artists”—his contribution to Agrarianism’s classic manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, published in 1930—Donald Davidson attacked what he called “the industrial theory of the arts.” According to this Maecenas concept, industrialism can be counted on to create an artistic renaissance in which not the wealthy classes only but the plain people will...
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The Grave Robbers
From the dry wash where they sat in camp chairs beneath an improvised ramada built of box-elder poles with armloads of cut greasewood laid on top, they could just make out, through the brush that obscured the wash, the wide, shallow cave arched thinly across the enigmatic yellow face of the opposing sandstone cliff. Lance...
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Gentlemen Prefer C’s
According to a recent front-page story in the New York Times, the latest innovation of a particularly ambitious segment of the upwardly mobile American middle class is the replacement of the old-fashioned summer camp with getting-into-college camp. In proportion as the Times is ignorant of One Big Thing, its editors are highly knowledgeable about many...
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Bella Sicilia, Clara e Oscura
The rugged mountains lifting into the vaporous cloud cap that repeated their tumultuous form on the aerial plane looked familiar enough—sky islands, we call them in the American Southwest. Only these were real islands, rising from blue sea rather than sere desert floor, and the clouds surmounting them were more than atmospheric; they were Homeric. ...
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“Immigration Is Our Strength”
“Immigration is our strength!” Or so neoconservatives and mainstream Republicans have argued for 20 years. Hispanic immigration, especially. Mexican immigrants, neoconservative wisdom has it, are hardworking, entrepreneurial, religious, and dedicated to family values. Not only are they model American citizens waiting to happen; they are natural Republican voters to be encouraged, developed, and sent marching...
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Gentlemen Prefer C’s
According to a recent front-page story in the New York Times, the latest innovation of a particularly ambitious segment of the upwardly mobile American middle class is the replacement of the old-fashioned summer camp with getting-into-college camp. In proportion as the Times is ignorant of One Big Thing, its editors are highly knowledgeable about many...
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The Machine in the Desert
How many years has it been since I became acquainted with Moab, Utah? More than I had realized, apparently. When I first saw the place, a room at the Canyonlands Motel cost $19.95 per night, I recall, and you could get breakfast at the motel’s cafeteria, pleasantly located in the shade of a hoary cottonwood...
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Cakewalk Through the Sand Dunes
This malignant little book, admirably successful in achieving the difficult feat of combining vapidity with nastiness, further exhibits dishonesty, hypocrisy, flattery, cant, and special pleading, in about equal parts. To this list of sins, we can finally add error—of the grossest magnitude. An End to Evil, though published just a few months ago, is not...
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Leftist Rage, Conservative Hate
Years ago, when we were very young and contributing promiscuously to the reviews departments of various intellectual publications, a misguided editor sent me a review copy of a leftist rant by an author whose name I have long since banished from memory, while clearly recalling the title. It was The Dying of the Light—taken, of...
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The Warming of the West
We know that nothing in this world stays the same. What we do not know is how or why it doesn’t. Probably, this is because we do not need to know. After five or six years in western Wyoming, in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, I recognized what seemed a stable weather pattern. Summers...
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Modern Controversy
Freedom of speech is a good thing. It is one of those very rudimentary good things, however, like sewage disposal and ballot voting, that civilized societies impose on uncivilized ones when engaged in the business of nation-building. Civilized societies, taking freedom of speech for granted for themselves, have always delighted in that pearl of great...
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Taking Over the Board
The Sierra Club’s reactivation of its eight-year intra- and extra-mural war over its policy concerning immigration is the latest exhibit opening at the Great American Madhouse. In 1996, the club officially announced itself neutral on the subject of immigration and population control. Two years later, a faction proposed a measure advocating immigration restriction in behalf...
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Never the Twain Shall Meet
Maps show Wyoming beginning in the western Black Hills at its northeastern corner and east of the Laramie Mountains at the southeastern one. Yet the beginning of a thing (or, for that matter, its end) is rarely so simple. To me, it is obvious that Wyoming begins on the western slope of the Snowy Range...
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In Praise of Firearms
Apparently from the conviction that one lie is as good (or as bad) as another, the left has never been known to let a lying cause die, if it could help it. I have read that Michael A. Bellesiles’ Arming America: The Story of a National Gun Culture (published by Knopf and awarded the 2001...
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Guest-Worker Amnesty
The Bush administration’s guest-worker amnesty proposal for “solving” the problem of illegal immigration is all about failure in two countries. In the case of Mexico, the failure is causal; in that of the United States, symbolic. Vicente Fox’s political weakness at home is largely the result of his failed attempt at browbeating George W. Bush...
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Blood of Deer and Patriots
The desert smelled like September, acrid and dry. It was the familiar high-desert smell, the smell of harvesttime without a harvest, unless you called the last thin cutting taken from among the willows along the creek a harvest. In the dead season, all deserts smell alike. Nothing was missing from the Mesopotamian variety but the...
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The Education of George Bush
I used to wonder at the deep melancholia to which Evelyn Waugh was subject in the last years of his life. “Papa,” his eldest daughter Meg would plead with him, “why are you so unhappy?” Waugh’s misery, verging on despair, struck me as unwarranted. He had, after all, great literary success, a large and creditable family,...
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A Dripping Spring
The parallel trails of brown smoke tracking west to east 50 or so miles ahead above the place where the Grand Canyon ought to be had a sinister aspect, suggesting another greasy invasion by the encroaching metropoli of the desert Southwest. “Is that L.A.?” I asked Tom Sheeley. “Or is it only Vegas?” Tom shook...
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Nothing Doing, Doing Nothing
Labor Day weekend honors those horny-handed men and brawny women who do the real work that gets done in America, hauling up to the pay office every two weeks in Cadillacs emblazoned with union decals to collect their fat two-week paychecks (five days’ work, another five on sick leave). A drone myself, I’m completely shameless...
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A Girl of the Gilded West
Lynette Lyon Hollow liked money. Because she had never had any of her own before, though, having it around made her nervous, and so she spent it whenever she saw something she thought worth spending money on. When more money kept coming in anyway than went out, she spent faster and faster on bigger and...
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Homecoming
I’d worked in the oil patch for several weeks already when I bought a T-shirt at the J.C. Penney Mother Store in Kemmerer. The shirt was fire-engine red with black lettering across the chest. The letters said, “IF YOU HAVE ONLY SIX MONTHS TO LIVE MOVE TO KEMMERER WYOMING. IT’LL SEEM LIKE A LIFETIME.” Since...
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A Banana Republic
An IRS publication printed this summer carries an article titled “Information for Employers Paying Wages to Illegal Aliens,” the purpose of which is to provide “a summary of an employer’s responsibility for withholding and reporting of employment taxes on wages paid to illegal aliens.” “For purposes of this article,” the IRS sagely explains, “an illegal...
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What the Thunder Said
“The earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods.” —Numbers 16:32 The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 convinced Voltaire (who didn’t need convincing to begin with) of the nonexistence of God. The Great California Earthquake, when it comes (as it must),...
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Life Was Simple Once. . .
Monkeys—when you consider how many subspecies of them are native to Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois—were sure to cause an epidemic of some kind in the Upper Midwest. In fact, monkeypox has been traced to prairie dogs sold as house pets after being infected by a single imported specimen of the giant Gambian rat, a three-pound...
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Two Deserts
Nineteen ninety-one was Operation Desert Storm. In 2003, it is Operation Shock and Awe—or was it Awe and Terror, or Shlock and Glock? We make progress backward, as befits the new millennium. Twelve years ago, the Pentagon at least managed to get the desert into it. The Mesopotamian Desert, as the troops have discovered on...
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A Good Day to Live
The hoof falls sounded measured as time, sixty beats to a minute, 3,600 to the hour, stretching out behind and ahead of them, inexorable like the past, like the future unforeseen, perhaps inevitable. Time neither slowed nor accelerated in approaching the good or the bad, though sometimes you could swear it did one or the...
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How the West Was Won—Again
Richard M. Weaver, in his discussion of forms and the concept of the formal in Ideas Have Consequences, has this to say about the custom and culture of the American frontier: The American frontiersman was a type who emancipated himself from culture by abandoning the settled institutions of the seaboard and the European motherland. Reveling...
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A Nation of (Proletarian) Immigrants
One of many reasons conservatives are so often at a disadvantage in political discussions is that we do not see why there should be any discussion, since we do not recognize a problem open to discussion at all. Take, for instance, assimilation. If you do not believe the United States should be accepting immigrants in...
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Ten Years Later
The Hundredth Meridian is now a decade old in conception, though a year short of that in reality. It had its origin in a biweekly column I was hired by James Hill to write in the winter and spring of 1993 for the Sunday Perspective section of the Arizona Republic, which James was editing at...
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Making Energy
The lives of great men are largely unconstrained, which may explain why there are so few great men today. All men are, of course, constrained by their personal limitations as well as by the limitations their age imposes on them, but it is in the nature of greatness to overcome such limitations to the extent...
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Elk Hunting in High Heels
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Having slept on the hard ground in single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, tramped all day through a snowstorm at 11,000 feet of elevation against a 40-mile-an-hour wind with a 20-pound survival pack and a seven-pound...
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Trench Warfare
War talk was running high when they threw the loaded packs in back of the Gold Pony and left Flagstaff, headed north across the Navajo Reservation. Television and the newspapers had nothing to say about anything except the towering evil of Hubbub Ihnssain, while National Public Radio had suspended All Things Considered to concentrate on...
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Western Swing
The Hollows, Hasty and Happy, were hardly ever sure where they were. At times, they weren’t sure who they were, either, but it never mattered for them because they were very, very rich. Hasty was from Chicago originally, and Happy from Mississippi, where she had earned half a degree from Ole Miss. In the days...
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The Geology of Time
Atop the final ridge rising to the south rim, Tom Hart stopped the truck and sat behind the wheel, gazing over into the meandering trench stretching from west to east and across it to the line of blue mountains over 40 miles away. It had been his first sight of the canyon when his family...