Terrorism has been a plague for Western democracies over the past decade, but in France and Britain it has not been a fatal disease. Other countries have not been so lucky. The Tupamaros of Uruguay took a country that, with all its problems of inflation and corruption, enjoyed 90 percent literacy, low infant mortality, and...
Author: E Christian Kopff (E Christian Kopff)
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Publishers and Sinners
The misadventures of James Joyce’s Ulysses at the hands of publishers and editors has recently been in the news. Many of the commentators seem to believe that what Joyce suffered was unusual, and that most contemporary authors are treated better. Listen to Thomas Marc Parrott (writing in 1934) on George Bernard Shaw: Mr. Shaw, for...
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Tradition and Justice
“We have forgotten the origin of morality in fact and circumstance.” —Wendell Berry Alasdair MacIntyre is our most relentless tracker of the crisis of the liberal regime. In After Virtue, he recounted the history of the triumph of “emotivism” in ethics. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? he has begun the process of pointing the way...
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Why Italy Runs
Americans find Italy a paradox. We love vacationing in a country with such delicious food, friendly people, and so many historical and cultural monuments. Its politics, however, bother us. After 20 years of one party rule, from 1923-43, it seemed to rebound into virtual chaos. There have been 46 governments since World War II, not...
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Molder of America
Nineteenth-century America was an explosively creative country. It opened up new territories to cultivation and poured forth a cornucopia of technical inventions. Its literature ranged from Hawthorne to Mark Twain, from Whitman to Stephen Foster, and its art included the architecture of McKim, Mead and White and the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907). Saint-Gaudens’s was...
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Electric Logocentricity
In the beginning was the Word. Not verbum, the written word, thought Erasmus, but sermo, the spoken word. Whatever its validity for understanding St. John’s Gospel, literature that matters seems to split along the lines of that dichotomy. There are exciting and important books that dance on the page, wheeling and turning at the command...
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Limited By Bias
Yale Scholar’s articles found in Nazi paper, read the headline in the New York Times for December 1, 1987. Paul de Man was a prolific member of the Yale Hermeneutical Mafia, which made the term “deconstructionism” an academic byword. By the time he passed away in December 1984, he was Sterling Professor of Humanities at...
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Dreams of Education
“They say such different things at school.” -W.B. Yeats William Butler Yeats, Senator of the Irish Republic, heard about contemporary trends in education from “a kind old nun in a white hood”: The children learn to cipher and to sing, to study reading-books and history, to cut and sew, be neat in everything in the...
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The Latin Invasions of English
“When all is said and done, something sticks in the Barbarians.” —Rudyard Kipling We need a practical education, an education that will be valid in the unforeseen and unforeseeable future. There are many possible forms, but all must include mathematics and Latin. Of the 100 most commonly used words in English, only 10 or so...
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Misprints and Misprision
“The sin against the spirit of a work always begins with a sin against the letter.” —Igor Stravinsky “When I hear the word ‘theory,’ I loosen the safety latch on my revolver,” remarked one disgruntled language teacher recently. He had an excuse, after all. He had just listened to an hour-long exposition of a Lacanian...
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Paying and Praying on the Old Homestead
Farming “will remain the same though Dynasties pass,” thought Thomas Hardy. In our own day, the farmer is beginning to be treated like an endangered species, a poor moulting bird that tenderhearted environmentalists want the government to take under its brooding wing. Hollywood became interested in him a few years ago, and a spate of...
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Dancing a Narrow (Party) Line
The tradition of the American musical film is a grand one, reaching back as it does to the great days of Busby Berkeley, of Astaire and Rogers, of Dick Powell and ZaSu Pitts. It suffers from one defect, inherent in its genre: how to find a plausible or at least not risible plot to tie...
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Priam’s Daughter
Christa Wolf is an East German novelist who delivered several lectures at the West German University of Frankfurt on a work-in-progress focusing on the Trojan seeress, Cassandra. Cassandra survived the sack of Troy to be taken back to Greece by Agamemnon, only to be slain with him by his wife, Clytemnestra. Her novella on this...
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A Saint Seduced
Rarely has any important figure in the history of Christianity been as ignorant of theology as Martin Niemöller. Even his friend and political ally Karl Earth commented on the fact. It was Niemöller’s single-minded courage and patriotism that made him important. In the Great War he was a U-boat commander. Disgusted with what he viewed...
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Still In Saigon—In My Mind
“The earth outside is covered with snow and I am covered with sweat. My younger brother calls me a killer and my daddy calls me a vet.” So the Vietnam veteran appears in a popular song recorded a few years back by Charlie Daniels (written by Dan Daley). The Vietnam War is over, but the...
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Dead Cows and Mangled Translations
Fyodor Abramov was awarded the State Prize of the U.S.S.R. in 1975 for his trilogy of life on a rural commune, The Pryaslins, of which Two Winters and Three Summers is the second volume. “Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop,” was the King’s advice to Alice, but Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
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A Textbook Case
Texas Politics, by Wilbourn Benton, professor of political science at Texas A&M, is a textbook that surveys the constitution of the state of Texas, with heavy emphasis on the written, legal structure of how the state is run. Much of the book is a dry summary. When he can, the author tells the story of...
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Short Day’s Journey Into Night
Martin Gottfried: Jed Harris: The Curse of Genius; Little, Brown; Boston. The man who called himself Jed Harris was the leading producer and director of the Broadway of the 20’s and 30’s. The staccato pacing of Broadway (1926) won him instant attention and a place on the cover of Time magazine. It turned the American...
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Inventing Lost Worlds
The American tourists were in Rome for the first time and asked the owner of their pensione where to visit. He urged them not to miss the Roman Forum. When they returned for lunch, they were quiet and grim mouthed. Finally, he asked them why, and the man burst out, “We never dreamed that you Italians...
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Screen – Macho Machines and Female Role Models: The Terminator
The Terminator: Directed by James Cameron; Written by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd; Orion. The Terminator is a machine, designed by other machines to hunt down and kill human beings. At first, one feels the same way about the movie Terminator itself: it is perfectly constructed to excite, frighten, dazzle, and arouse other appropriate emotions...
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Ideological Time Twisting
John Arden: Vox Pop: Last Days of the Roman Republic; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. by E. Christian Kopff The fact that John Arden has written a novel is important news for people who care about the health of the English language and its literature. As with his plays, the basic idea for the...