Author: The Archive (The Archive)

Although Greg Kaza has political pretenses [sic], a recent article in Chronicles (Cultural Revolutions, June 1992) suggests that he has not learned even the most elementary lessons of American politics-least of which that it is “the art of the possible.”  The problem with Kaza is that he is an ideologue. Like most ideologues, he would...

Arthur Asher Shenfield died on February 13 at the age of 80. A British lawyer and economist, he spent much of the last three decades as a visiting professor at American colleges and universities, setting forth with rare vigor and clarity the principles of the free market and its role as the only economic system...

K-12 education in America is, nationally, a disaster—that is something everyone seems to agree on. But on the local level, the parents of schoolchildren are hearing a different story. In a 1988 study an educational watchdog group called Friends for Education discovered that all of the 50 states were reporting that their elementary and secondary...

Barry Sadler, the Vietnam veteran who wrote and recorded “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” died in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, last November 5. He was 49 years old. Sadler had been shot in the forehead in Guatemala City in September 1988, an incident that had left him brain damaged and partially paralyzed. The cause of death...

The NEA is back to business as-before—if anybody thought our elected representatives had any intention of listening to the will of voters, the recent NEA waffle and the newly revived congressional pay hike would squelch those fantasies. Under pleas from both parties not to make the pay hike a “partisan” issue, an increase for the folks...

The Peace Corp is going to the aid of glasnost and perestroika. President Bush has proposed the sending of the Peace Corps to Hungary and Poland, and Peace Corps director Paul Coverdell and staff are busy making the necessary arrangements. Peace Corps press officer Jim Flanigan says this marks “no great departure” from the Peace...

“Trade without frontiers”—when the European Economic Community talks about barrier-free trade, the wall begins at Spain and the US is left on the wrong side of it, as the Bush administration, which has supported the coming federation of Europe, is beginning to discover. In October the EEC voted 10 to 2 to adopt a set...

The Disabilities Act is likely to entertain C-SPAN viewers for months to come. The bill, which in its current form is a compromise worked out between the Bush administration and congressional Democrats, extends sweeping civil rights protection to the nation’s blind, deaf, lame, and degenerate (AIDS is, of course, a handicap). Times being what they...

Freedom Association has come to mean no freedom of dissociation, at least not in Madison, Wisconsin. There a city statute barring discrimination in housing has been interpreted by the Madison Equal Opportunities Commission (MEOC) to apply to roommates. In other words, when Ann Hacklander and Maureen Rowe were told by their prospective roommate Cari Sprague...

Illegal aliens rank high on any social reformer’s list of priorities. At the very time millions of tax dollars are being spent to patrol our borders and to prosecute the illegals, CUNY—the City University of New York—announced in August that not only will it continue to welcome illegal aliens into its fold, but it will...

Publicly Funded Art is causing a stir now in Los Angeles, where a mural citing (in part) the Pledge of Allegiance has drawn fire from a neighborhood group. The Little Tokyo Community Development Advisory Committee complained that placing a mural featuring the pledge above LA’s Little Tokyo was, at the very least, insensitive to the...

Witches and Satanists tax-exempt? When we raised the issue in the September 1988 Chronicles, several members of the nation’s clerical lobby scoffed. But in Rhode Island, the home of Roger Williams and other champions of religious freedom without responsibility, a witches’ coven known as Our Lady of the Roses Wiccan Church has apparently met the...

Batman was the summer’s box office sensation. Responses to the film followed the usual pattern: audiences and lowbrow critics loved it; highbrow critics turned up their noses. Pans from serious film critics are the best recommendation a movie can get. Yes, it is a dark and violent movie, and yes, Michael Keaton is a perfectly...

Girl’s SAT scores are lower than boys because of bias in the questions, charges a Center for Women Policy Studies report. Nationally, boys score higher on 4 of the verbal questions and 17 of the math, and the fact that they do better is alone prima facie evidence, according to Phyllis Rosser, that the Educational...

The yelping began almost as soon as Jesse Helms proposed his plan for bringing the National Endowment for the Arts under control. Helms’ amendment would forbid the use of federal funds to “Promote, disseminate or produce indecent materials.” There was hardly a respectable newspaper that did not yell “censorship” and decry this attempt to “politicize...

“Hasidic Village in New York wants own public school district” blared The New York Times (July 21). The Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel, NY, already runs its own private schools, but the town (100 percent Hasidic) has been pushing for special religious accommodations in the nearby public school’s handicapped programs. Parents are unhappy with the...

A Flag Amendment—what would be the effect? In one school of thought that goes back through Acton to Jefferson to Plato, the health of a society is inversely proportional to the amount of written law (and the number of lawyers) it has. A suspicion of lawmaking is even more justified in the case of constitutional...

The March Chronicles stirred up a great deal of hostility in strange quarters, where freedom of expression used to defend everything but unfashionable opinions. The Perspective essay on immigration even attracted the attention of a newspaper editor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, named Paul Greenberg. In an op-ed piece published in the Washington Times, Greenberg applies...

Free speech has been one of the great American luxuries, but according to the University of Wisconsin it may prove to be too expensive. In April its Board of Regents passed a rule that would make racial, ethnic, or sexist epithets grounds for expulsion. This does not come out of nowhere: last fall the Zeta...

Judicial tyranny is a familiar phenomenon as judges routinely take charge of school systems and strike down state laws on abortion, pornography, and murder. Recently, one federal judge has even changed the property taxes in Kansas City, MO, while a federal district judge in Des Moines upheld the right of convicts in Iowa to read...

Immigration is increasingly becoming a major subject for concern among Americans. In a recent report released by FAIR, 51 percent of 800 Californians surveyed thought the US was accepting “too many” legal immigrants, while only 35 percent replied “too few” or “about right.” Sixty-nine percent thought there ought to be a limit, as opposed to...

Affirmative Action Art was supposed to solve the headaches of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—still reeling from last year’s response to its display of a painting depicting the late Mayor Harold Washington in frilly underwear—when it hurriedly arranged an all-minority show at the school. But instead of peace and quiet, they got...

Edward Levine, professor emeritus of social psychology at Loyola University of Chicago, was an academic and a truthteller, a combination increasingly hard to find in the modern university. His wide range of interests was reflected in his work, from his book The Irish and Irish Politicians: A Study of Social and Cultural Alienation (University of...

If it’s Christmas, then ’tis the season for creche suits, and this past December was no different. The Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against Gov. Wallace Wilkinson because the state constructed a Nativity scene on the front lawn of the Capitol in Frankfort. Children from the Good Shepherd School (Catholic)...

The Washington Post is best known outside the newspaper business for the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein—not to mention Janet Cooke. But in the long run, the Post‘s most enduring achievement is that it pioneered the modern newspaper feature section. Until the late 1960’s, most features sections were called “women’s pages,” but when Post...

John William Corrington’s early death ended the career of a distinguished and prolific literary figure. His first book appeared in 1961; it was followed by three other books of poetry, numerous novels, and four of the best short story collections of our times. He had stories selected for the Best American Short Stories in 1972,...

Some studies have failed to find that executions have any success in deterring homicides. But according to sociologist Steven Stack of Auburn University in the American Sociological Review (August 1987, vol. 52, pp. 532-540), those studies have been methodologically flawed by the highly questionable assumption “that the public is more or less aware of executions...

None dare call it treason when a former US President intrigues with the head of an unfriendly foreign government. But when Jimmy Carter met with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega on February 2, Vice President Quayle had the courage to say: “Obviously, when you have a former President meeting with heads of state we don’t meet...

“I’m tired of having to go to the office armed,” my wife said one day last March. She was not alone in going armed—especially not since the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had entered the case of the “Center City Stalker,” a young black man who had committed a series of robberies...

School decentralization was one of the few practical items on the New Left’s agenda of the 1960’s. It was a genuinely radical idea, since the entire history of public education in the US has been the steady progress of consolidation and centralization. Small districts were merged, time after time, into larger consolidated units, and power...

The Bennett interregnum has come to a close at the Department of Education. The former secretary of education had his shortcomings, but the vice with which he was most frequently charged—being “confrontational,” failing to “build coalitions with educators”—was actually his greatest virtue. Bennett knew better than to attempt significant reform by backroom dealings and conciliation...

Ethnic disturbances pose “the most immediate threat to Gorbachev, the one thing that could put him out of power,” said the Deputy Director of the CIA, Robert M. Gates. Zbigniew Brzezinski and other US analysts concurred. The recent ethnic strife in Estonia, Latvia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Romania, Bulgaria, even Yugoslavia is, in the words of The...

Hangouts for the KGB are what libraries have become, according to the FBI. In a new report to the Senate, the Bureau says that libraries have been targets of espionage efforts since at least 1962. The Soviets have found that laying hands on secret documents is frequently unnecessary; they can simply collect what they need...

Fathers are striking back in the cultural war over abortion. As a slogan, “abortion rights” has translated into the woman’s absolute prerogative to abort her unborn child. It is not only the interests of the child that are brutally crushed by this “right”; the desires of fathers—even married fathers—have also been brushed aside as irrelevant...

Laurie Dann, a bizarre psychotic who sent poisoned food to acquaintances and former employers and once stabbed her husband with an ice pick, shot up a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Illinois, murdering one child and wounding several others before killing herself. To people in the community, it should have been (and was) a source of...

Sex and the clergy have never made a good combination, and when the nation’s Catholic bishops wrote a draft letter on the status of women, we could just about predict the outcome. The time has passed when clergymen shepherded flocks or attended to questions of the eternal. Men of the cloth now keep busy scrambling...

Lyndon LaRouche has been back in the news. Not only is the leader himself on trial for the political equivalent of credit card fraud, but in Illinois the two LaRouche candidates who managed to torpedo Adlai Stevenson’s gubernatorial campaign are both running again. LaRouche is, so far as we can tell, an unlikable crank without...