“Yes, we have no bananas” was a hit song from the 1920s. Here a Greek fruit vendor answers all questions with “yes,” even when the answer is negative. In today’s America, we have lots of bananas. First, of course, are the curved yellow fruits sold in bunches. You may be living in Alaska or Massachusetts, with a...
Roughly twenty years ago, a man in Asheville, North Carolina left his home in the wee hours of the morning, walked a couple of blocks to a convenience store, burglarized the store, and returned home with his loot. Unfortunately for our thief, snow had blanketed the city earlier that night. After responding to the burglary...
My mom loved listening to Broadway musicals and particularly favored South Pacific. By the time I left for college, she had played that record so often I had memorized most of the songs and can still belt them out. I also saw the movie with her—I’m generally not a fan of musicals on film, and this...
Combine Moses and a Harvard discourse on cancel culture and one encounters a perfect storm for prophetic words. That’s exactly what happened on Feb. 16, 1999, when Charlton Heston, movie star and president of the National Rifle Association, addressed a standing-room-only crowd at Harvard Law School. The film actor who played Moses and Ben Hur...
I was sitting in my local coffee shop when “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” began playing over the café’s speaker. Perhaps because this Christmas is so fraught with fear and uncertainty, this song caught my attention. I pushed aside my other thoughts and gave my full attention to the music, hunting down the lyrics...
According to my online dictionary, an oath is “a solemn promise, often invoking a divine witness, regarding one’s future action or behavior.” Oaths play a big role in our society. The Boy Scouts, known today as Scouts BSA since admitting girls to the organization, begin their weekly meetings by raising their right hand in the...
A career as a writer offers many thrills as one piece after another gets picked up and published. Today, however, it also offers many nervous chills, as the specter of cancel culture could broadside a writer at any moment. I experienced one of the former thrills of writing when a piece of mine was published...
My article “The New Resistance Is Rising” appeared on Intellectual Takeout on Dec. 1, 2020. Since then, we’ve seen even more evidence of fraud in November’s presidential contest, the Supreme Court and other lower courts have refused to look at the evidence of this fraud, and the left will likely take control of our federal government. Should Joe...
This year has brought us a brutal lesson in the truth of the phrase “Ideas Have Consequences,” popularized by political philosopher Richard Weaver in 1948. Weaver argued that the rise of relativism was damaging Western civilization, eroding our abilities to use reason and logic for problem solving. Such loss of reason and logic have been...
Madness abounds. At an Illinois shopping mall on December 6, a boy asked a masked Santa Claus for a Nerf gun for Christmas. That Jolly Old Elf sternly said no, no guns of any kind, and suggested other gifts like Legos, leaving the poor kid in tears. His mother admirably refrained from punching Santa in the nose....
Attempts to erase or denigrate our country’s past are now routine. Men and women once regarded as heroes and great Americans are regularly attacked as racists, sexists, and capitalists, their statues of remembrance removed in the popular sport of statue-toppling. Sadly, such contempt for our past and for America’s ideals was likely...
My daughter’s friend—I’ll call her Amanda—never wears a mask anywhere. When the clerk standing outside our local grocery store distributing free masks and hand sanitizer asks if she’d like a mask, Amanda smiles and says “No, thank you.” If he asks, “Are you sure?” she nods and says, “I don’t have to wear a mask....
Though some students have found learning at home relieves them of school’s social stresses, many others miss their teachers, classmates, and the routine of the school day. Some of the little ones have become more defiant and have reverted to bed-wetting, while many older students suffer from depression. In “The Children of Quarantine: What does...
In the 1976 film Network, a newscaster driven to the brink of insanity by his rage exhorts his viewers to throw open the windows of their apartments and homes, and shout “I’m mad as h—, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Within minutes, thousands of people are roaring these words into the night. In...
Not everyone has a Hallmark Christmas. WebMD’s article “Holiday Depression and Stress” reminds readers that while for most people the holiday season is “a fun time of the year filled with parties, celebrations, and social gatherings with family and friends,” for others the holidays can bring “sadness, self-reflection, loneliness, and anxiety.” ...
We seem to hear little this year about the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in November 1620. Perhaps the coronavirus is the cause, or maybe the ugly mess and turmoil of our presidential election has overshadowed its remembrance. Or maybe political correctness has claimed another victim. Whatever the case, the 400th anniversary...
In 1917, wearied and angered by the slaughter on the Western Front, French soldiers marched toward the battlefield past the general staff bleating like sheep, protesting what they correctly surmised would be another blood bath. Later they would openly mutiny against these attacks, willing to defend the front but unwilling to continue charging across No Man’s Land...
It seems a newer virus is now infecting American citizens. It can be deadly, killing off joy, compassion, reason, and objectivity. It renders its victims deaf to argument and blind to facts, creating in some of them so fevered a passion that they wind up in cloud cuckoo land. This virus goes under the name...
Where’d everybody go? Whatever happened to the Jeffrey Epstein case? Traces of the Durham Report, which was investigating those who manufactured the story of Russian interference in the 2016 election, seem to have also disappeared from view. Or what about Hunter Biden? His laptop full of secrets and the possible corrupt practices of his father,...
The growing evidence of massive fraud in the 2020 elections should distress and sicken all voters, Democrats and Republicans alike. Kill voters’ trust in the election process, and you’re putting a knife into the heart of our republic. This whole year has shown that America’s elite maintain a culture that blithely ignores the concerns of...
At 11:00 on the morning of November 11, 1918, the Great War, which some at the time innocently called “The War to End All Wars,” came to an end. The guns fell silent, the murderous slaughter of soldiers and civilians ceased, and the survivors in the trenches and on the battlefields realized they would live...
Joe Biden may have declared victory, but whether he or Donald Trump officially wins the presidency may remain undetermined for weeks, even months, and even then we may see the election brought before the Supreme Court. Who knows? What we do know is that this election has delivered a mess not seen since 2000, when...
For 26 years, I taught hundreds of home-educated students, including my own children. My checkered teaching career also includes a semester in a university, two years at a prison, and two years in a public high school. During my last 15 years of that teaching, I conducted seminars for homeschoolers in Asheville, North Carolina, offering...
For decades, conservative commentators and writers have told anyone who would listen that America is going to hell in a handbag. (An aside: Why do people always go to hell in a handbag? If I must go to hell, I’d prefer a limousine with a fully stocked bar; some beloved books; a picnic basket overflowing...
Recently I read of a 67-year-old woman who wanted to run in a marathon. She had never run for exercise in her life, but her desire and passion led her to put on a pair of sneakers, leave the house, and walk a mile. Every day she walked through her neighborhood, extending the distance a...
“‘Shut up,’ he explained.” —Ring Lardner, The Young Immigrants This past year, certain reporters, some students and professors, and the Canadian government have hounded Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, for his protests against the government’s Bill C-16, passed with Royal Assent in mid-June, which makes the misuse of “gender identity...
We often smile when we hear of Victorian prudery regarding sex. A mother’s advice to her daughter before her marriage regarding conjugal relations—“Just lie back and think of England, dear”—evokes laughter. We chuckle when we learn that our ancestors referred to chicken breasts as “white meat,” to chicken legs as “drumsticks.” In our sexually charged...
It’s nine o’clock on Tuesday. First into the classroom today are my Advanced Placement European History students. I begin the class, as I always do, with a prayer, and then deliver a lecture on such Enlightenment luminaries as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot. (Given the irreligious beliefs of these figures, the irony of prayer is not...
In the summer of 2015, thanks to the generosity of friends, ex-students, and parents whose children I now teach, I spent a month in Rome. Since my return to the United States, several friends and family members have asked me to record my general impressions of “the Eternal City.” So here goes. First, Rome offers...
Some 30 years ago, I read Stuart Brent’s The Seven Stairs, an autobiography about the author’s life-long love affair with his books and his Chicago bookshop, once a Mecca for bibliophiles and authors. Brent’s customers included patrons like Katharine Hepburn and Ernest Hemingway, and he counted among his friends numerous writers, including Nelson Algren. Though...
Dear Dr. R——: Recently, I read an article about the explosion in the number of Americans receiving disability from the federal government. In fact, that same government now pays out more for disabilities than it does for food stamps and welfare combined. Certainly, many of those receiving aid truly require this assistance. But after perusing...
Maximus: Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo. That is not it. That is not it! Proximo: Marcus Aurelius is dead, Maximus. We mortals are but shadows and dust. Shadows and dust, Maximus! —from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator Every time I watch the above scene from Gladiator, that powerful movie about the decadence of...
During the early morning hours of Monday, March 31, an unidentified person or persons smashed out the window of a ten-year-old Honda Civic parked on Cumberland Street in the neighborhood of Montford in Asheville. The car is registered in my name. My son, who works here in Asheville, had used the car for several years...
American boys and men have always taken great pride in hitting targets. Whether that target was a bulls-eye during an archery class at summer camp or a catcher’s mitt in high school baseball, we applaud those who possess the ability to strike a target. The first act of an eleven year old given a BB...
This is a story of a place, of joy and regret, and of a deed so romantic and so rare as to border on the fantastical. In the early fall of 1955, my father, a physician who had just completed an internship and a year of residency in family practice, moved our growing family from...
My dear Hobson, Given your exasperated response to my advice on making big bucks in the Land of O (“Surviving the Budget Crisis,” Correspondence, March), I conclude that your university taught you to appreciate the literary tools of sarcasm, sardonic humor, hyperbole, and irony. Points to you, nephew: You have acquired a carpenter’s box with...
Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky In the last five years, a heightened awareness of beauty and the mystery of beauty has played with my senses more than at any other time in my life, excluding, perhaps, my childhood, when the world so often...
Something strange is haunting our dreams these days. The teenage cashier at the grocery store is conversing with a customer in front of my sister. “That’s right,” she says. “The only thing that will work now is for civilization to collapse so we can all go back to nature.” The next day I encounter a...
My dear Hobson, The bleak tone of your email has distressed me. You report waking on the morning of November 7 convinced that a vast majority of politicians—Republicans and Democrats—are certifiable lunatics. According to your somewhat incoherent letter—were you inebriated, or are all those sentence fragments and dangling prepositions the dismal product of your recently...
Some people have no sense of humor. In the summer of 1998, Eric Rudolph, bomber of two abortion clinics, a lesbian bar, and the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, was on the run from the law in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Scores of FBI agents and other officials, trailed by reporters and television crews,...
“As a busily growing animal, I am scatterbrained and entirely lacking in mental application. Having no desire at present to expend my precious energies upon the pursuit of knowledge, I shall not make the slightest attempt to assist you in your attempts to impart it. If you can capture my unwilling attention and goad me...
Two years ago, in one of the history seminars I offer to homeschoolers, I remarked on Robert E. Lee’s convictions regarding duty. We had just finished reviewing his life—his youth spent as acting head of his small household, his years at West Point both as a cadet and as superintendent, his heroism in the war...
On this Friday evening, the Drum Circle has formed in Pritchard Park. The drummers, many of them on the downhill side of 40, follow the lead of a tall black man standing before them. The music is primitive and repetitious, like the drumming in one of the old Tarzan flicks. In front of the drummers...
Sometimes a great book and the place in which it was read combine to cast a spell so potent and so enduring that both book and place become forever entwined in the memory of the reader. Whenever I see a copy of War and Peace, I think not only of Pierre and Natasha but of...
In late June, a friend and I traveled into Central Georgia, looking for Flannery O’Connor. Mary Ann had never heard of Flannery O’Connor. She didn’t know Hazel Motes from a hole in the ground and assured me she had never encountered “A Good Man Is Hard To Find“ or “The Life You Save May Be...
“This all sounds fanatical if people don’t know about it. I’m not a radical person.” Despite her critics, and despite the rough reelection campaign she faces in Charlotte this fall, U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC, 9th District) has spent the last two years fighting to bring her concerns before Congress and the American people. In...
For the last 20 years of the world’s bloodiest century, Lech Walesa, along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, was a man on a pedestal in my pantheon of contemporary heroes, one of those who had helped bring about an end to communism in Eastern Europe and the demise of the Soviet Union. ...
Whenever my family gathers together—usually at Thanksgiving or New Year’s, and nearly always in the rambling old home belonging to my wife and me in Waynesville, North Carolina—the conversation commences before the engines of the arriving cars have cooled in the driveway. This talk, which I have come privately to regard as the Great Conversation,...
Suppose that you are one of five owners of a professional football team, which has just come off a losing season. You and the other disgruntled owners have gathered at a conference table to discuss plans for the next year. The five of you toss around ideas for improvement—a bigger stadium, new uniforms, more strategic...