The catastrophic burst of the housing bubble in the fall of 2008 shook the foundations of the world economy and instilled a fear of a new depression. Morris Dickstein notes with irony that he completed his cultural history of the Great Depression just as the country was entering a steep recession with parallels to the...
If you can remember the 1960’s, the old line goes, you weren’t really there. “There,” of course, means the counterculture represented by Woodstock, hallucinogenic drugs, antiwar protests, and Haight-Ashbury. “The 60’s” didn’t actually begin in 1960, but by the “Summer of Love” in 1967 they had clearly arrived. The Beatles eventually became counterculture icons while...
Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent, is not happy with the current state of American civilization, a view he makes crystal clear in Empire of Illusion. Hedges is an independent man of the left and a cultural conservative. Chronicles readers may recall the controversy over his commencement address in 2003 at Rockford...
Barack Obama has risen to the highest office in the land on a thin résumé—a pair of Ivy League degrees, some time spent as a “community organizer,” and short periods in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate. And then there are the books. The President is the author of the best-selling Audacity of Hope...
“Trust no one.” The landmark TV series The X-Files used that catchphrase in depicting a world riven with conspiracies that reach to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agents who attempted to unravel these grand conspiracies, make the occasional appearance in Kathryn Olmsted’s Real Enemies. Man...
“Arrogance and boldness belong to those that are accursed of God.” —Saint Clement of Rome After the end of the Cold War, reasonable people might have expected the United States to withdraw from her many foreign commitments and become a normal country again. Yet the opposite has happened. Rather than dissolve, NATO has expanded. Instead...
Many news stories from the first half of 2008 read like a page out of the Book of Revelation. Rising grain prices were already leading to food riots in developing countries when a one-two punch, in the form of Cyclone Nargis and a series of tornadoes and floods, devastated the rice crop in Burma and...
World War II cast an enormous cultural shadow over American life. It provided a backdrop for novels, television shows, and—especially—movies. Like many boys who grew up in the decades after the war, I read about the conflict, traced my fingers across maps illustrating the U.S. island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, watched and rewatched war movies,...
The first thing one notices about Print Is Dead is that it is, in fact, a stack of bound pieces of paper with words printed on them. The author, Jeff Gomez, notes the irony of this in his Introduction. On the other hand, the book is a shabby-looking volume that appears intentionally to violate the...
By now, it should be clear to all but the most loyal Republicans that the government of the United States is controlled by madmen. In the beginning, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney seemed comparatively normal; their first few months in office were a relief after the farcical second term of Bill Clinton. It was...
There is no question that the concept of manhood is a shell of what it once was. In popular culture, men are depicted as being slightly dim-witted, obsessed with video games, sports, and fast food. “Guys,” we are told, rush to Hardees because they can’t fix their own breakfast. Although one can see a great...
The political culture of the United States is cramped and stunted by the narrow range of acceptable viewpoints and the utterly banal, subliterate tone of our political campaigns—to compare American elections to the marketing of soap is an insult to the people who sell soap. If, as Sean Scallon notes in Beating the Powers That...
I admit to being a biased reviewer. Donkey Cons is a book about the Democratic Party, and I will say up front that I don’t much care for the Democrats. Consider a sorry, random list: Kennedy (pick one), Pelo-si, Schu-mer, Clinton (pick one), Dean, Kerry, Lieber-man. The names alone are enough to turn one’s stomach. There...
Rod Dreher’s book labors under a few handicaps. First, there is the cloying title and absurdly long subtitle. In addition, the cover features a cutesy picture of a VW microbus with a GOP elephant painted above the grille. The back cover features a “Crunchy Con Manifesto” that is a bit simplistic. “We are conservatives who...
There is no question that the media landscape has shifted seismically in the last two decades. In the Reagan years, I eagerly subscribed to National Review and the American Spectator; I even sent in an ad from National Review for a magazine called Chronicles of Culture. Those publications, joined by Human Events and numerous syndicated...
Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency by Sen. Robert C. Byrd New York: W.W. Norton & Co.; 270 pp., $23.95 Robert Byrd is the ultimate political survivor. He has served in Congress for more than 50 years and has cast more votes than any other senator in American history. Publicists for the Stupid...
Politics, said Henry Adams, “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” In recent months, best-seller lists have helped to prove Adams’ point, by featuring many vituperative political tracts from the left and right. The undisputed queen of the genre is Ann Coulter, whose overheated book Slander sold like hotcakes in 2002; lately, she has...
It is difficult sometimes to remember the days before September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush was a decidedly ordinary President whose anemic victory the previous fall had required a month’s worth of recounts and court decisions to confirm. After the terrorist attacks, President Bush’s approval rating soared, and his administration sought and received vast...
Beirut’s occupation in 1983 by U.S. Marines may provide a small-scale sample of what a prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq could be like, should the Pollyannaish postwar scenarios of some members of the War Party fail to materialize. Of course, the two situations are, in some ways, very different. Beirut, for instance, is just a...
“There is something about a man in uniform,” the old adage goes. Few have been as affected by their time in uniform as Paul Fussell, who served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1947, during which period (he tells us in his memoir) he was “ill-treated by members of the German Wehrmacht.” The titles...
I first learned of the improbably named Smedley Darlington Butler while attending Marine Corps boot camp in South Carolina. At Parris Island, we were taught that Butler was, along with Dan Daly, one of two U.S. Marines to have been awarded the Medal of Honor twice. Along with five-time Navy Cross recipient Louis B. “Chesty” Puller,...
“Hillbilly.” The earliest recorded use of the word is from the New York Journal of April 23, 1900. As you might guess from that publication’s city of origin, the term was not intended as a compliment. The journal defined a hillbilly as “a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills,...
Tazwell is a town in Claiborne County, Tennessee, about 45 minutes northeast of Knoxville on Highway 33, just south of the Kentucky border. On the muggy Saturday morning of June 3, 2000—the 192nd anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis and Confederate Memorial Day in Tennessee — some 200 people gathered in Tazwell’s Irish Cemetery...
Bill Clinton has often been compared to Warren C. Harding, and considering that president’s scandals and adulterous affair within the White House, the parallel seems valid. The better comparison, however, may be with Harding’s predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. At least that is the impression one gets reading James Bovard’s book. Under Wilson, the country witnessed a...
Hank Williams died on New Year’s Day, 1953. He was not yet 30 when he passed away in the back of a Cadillac. The circumstances of his life and death created the legendary aura that surrounds Williams and virtually guaranteed that he would be the subject of many songs as well as a writer and...