Nineteen ninety-one was the year of revolutions, the greatest, perhaps, since 1848. Many who observed the events from safe seats on this side of the Atlantic must have recalled Churchill’s great Fulton speech, in which he described the “Iron Curtain” that had “descended across the continent,” cutting off “all the capitals of the ancient states...
Douglas Wilder made a splash in New Hampshire last August, when he devoted a pre-campaign speech to the theme of putting America first. “We cannot focus all our energies on the international arena at the expense of America’s finances and economic health.” Denying he is an isolationist, Wilder asked, “If jobs are going to be...
The heroic age of modern poetry has been over for some time. The learned reactionaries who shaped it for two generations have all been dead for many years: Eliot (1965) and Pound (1972), Valéry (1945) and Claudel (1955), Ungaretti (1970) and Montale (1981). Diverse in style and technique, the great modernists were all ambitious in...
I owe this trip to our secretary, Leann, who kept looking out for low airfares to Europe. Only a few days before she discovered Alitalia’s summer half-price sale, I had received another kind invitation to spend a few days at the Centro Internazionale per Studi Lombardi (CEISLO). I bribed my wife into coming along by...
The botched coup in the Soviet Union should have been an occasion for somber reflections. For a few days it appeared that U.S. foreign policy, built almost entirely around the person of Mikhail Gorbachev, might be in ruins. The failure of the plot, while it has temporarily restored Mr. Gorbachev’s fortunes, could not disguise the...
Immigration problems continue to plague Europe. In France the Front National is finally fed up with the Gaullist right, which expects the support of the and-immigrant nationalists but treats them with contempt. Jacques Chirac is alarmed enough to begin borrowing the Front National’s rhetoric. When the Prime Minister, ditzy socialist Edith Cresson, called for a...
In July I took my four children back to the South Carolina village in which they had spent their earliest years. The most frequent topics of conversation were still, in order, Hurricane Hugo and its aftermath, a public school controversy that appeared to pit blacks against whites but really concerned the ambitions of a New...
“Politically correct” is this year’s catch phrase, and before Christmas it will be as stale as the new miniskirt or yesterday’s George Will. Always willing to outdo themselves in gullibility, decent Americans are routinely writing letters to the editor or calling up Rush Limbaugh to protest the infamy of thought control on the nation’s campuses....
While the genre of science fiction is hardly a century old, the roots of science fiction go deep into our history. Men have always told stories, and in telling them they have inevitably recast the world of their perceptions into something easier to grasp, more beautiful or more terrible than it really is. At bottom,...
The better future which Americans propose to build is nothing if not an idea which must in certain essential respects emancipate them from their past. American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation. On the whole, it is a past of which the loyal American has no...
American ignorance of European politics is as sublime as ever. All eyes switch back and forth (as in a tennis match) from the Middle East to Eastern Europe, and what goes on among the allies who gave us our civilization—France, Germany, Italy, Britain—remains a closed book. Of England we hear occasional tidings from her expatriate...
Few people, apart from film buffs, recognize the name Donald Siegel, but since the 1940’s Mr. Siegel had directed some of the best American films ever made. Critics either hated or despised him both for pandering to popular tastes and for refusing to pander to the political prejudices of the intellectuals. The original Invasion of...
Not so long ago anticommunist conservatives used to rail against the mirror fallacy, the leftist assumption that the Soviet Union could be studied in Western terms. If only we could strengthen the hand of the doves and “responsible” elements, we could keep the country from falling into the hands of the hard-liners and hawks—the Soviet...
The New World Order promised by George Bush is turning out to be something like a unisex barbershop that can buzz off a woman’s locks while giving male customers a wave and a perm. Over and over we have heard the phrase “our men and women stationed in the Gulf.” As the war went on,...
“In the government of Virginia,” said John Randolph in 1830, “we can’t take a step without breaking our shins over some Federal obstacle.” Randolph’s metaphor was a minor exaggeration 160 years ago; today, it would be a gross understatement, because today that federal obstacle has been erected so high, so deep, so strong, that we...
George Bush chose a risky moment for launching his New World Order. World stock markets have reacted to the vicissitudes of war with all the stability of a manic-depressive who won’t take his medicine when he’s feeling up and doesn’t see the point of taking it when he’s down. The mere rumors of war were...
“I too dislike it” —Marianne Moore The sculptress Malvina Hoffman found the poetry of her friend Marianne Moore hard to understand and would sometimes ask her to read a poem aloud. “Then I would say, ‘I really don’t know what that’s all about, because of my own ignorance, I’m sure, but just possibly you might...
Syria’s conquest of Lebanon is the first fruits of the Bush administration’s Middle Eastern policy. While 200,000 American soldiers were fighting off boredom in Saudi Arabia, our newest noble ally in the region, “President” Assad of Syria, was storming the Christian positions in Beirut. With a 40,000-man force that included hundreds of Soviet T-54 tanks,...
When I told friends that I was going to Italy to study the political situation there, the usual response was an amused puzzlement. Italian politics, I was informed, is like the Italian army: a grand opera performance of a comic opera plot. I am not so sure. Since the later Middle Ages, the Italians have...
We are often accused of looking on the dark side of everything. One editorialist even found it amusing that we occasionally compared contemporary America with the Byzantine Empire, as if such a comparison were not an insult to the Christian civilization of Constantinople. Despite our reputation, we like to think of ourselves as hardheaded optimists,...
Saddam Hussein’s little expedition into Kuwait has begun to take on the colors of a counter-crusade against European and American influence in the Middle East. As I write, in the second week of August, it is too early to predict the outcome of any of President Bush’s diplomatic and military initiatives. In general, he deserves...
A few years ago I found myself in the belly of the beast. To be more accurate, I was actually in the appendix of the beast, the Department of Education, giving a paper on curriculum reform. Secretary Bennett, who preceded me, spoke with his accustomed exuberance of the then current crisis in the humanities and...
Walker Percy never tired of asking a simple question: why are people happy in circumstances that ought to make them miserable? It was a question he set for himself in his first collection of philosophical essays, The Message in the Bottle, and in one way or another his best novels—The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love...
Earth Day 1990. In front of the local library a few dozen people dressed up like Hollywood extras in a movie about the 60’s are “carrying signs that say hurray for our side,” while all over town there are alleys full of garbage, creeks choked with old mufflers and rusted appliances. In New York, Chicago,...
The Simpsons is both the hottest and the most controversial program on television. At first sight, a cartoon show for children and adults is not promising material for “equality” TV (remember The Flintstones? The Jetsons?). Worse, the graphic style of the show is as disturbing as any drawing we have ever printed in Chronicles: The...
“To us your good Samaritan was a fool to risk the security of his family to help a stranger.” —Joey Tai in Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon It has been more than a year since we put out the March 1989 number of Chronicles, “A Nation of Immigrants,” in which it was suggested that...
The 1990 census arrived last week, along with the usual past due notices and Gold Card applications. I am one of the lucky Americans who received the long form, which asks for such inconsequential data as how much I earn, which of the myriad minorities I swear allegiance to, and how much money I spent...
Most Americans don’t know much about art, but they do know what they don’t like, namely blasphemy, pornography, and perversion. When they began to realize, in the course of 1989, that their own government, through the National Endowment for the Arts, was funding exhibitions of homosexual photographs and crucifixes in urine, they blew off enough...
Peace is busting out all over, and along with the prospect of peace comes the debate over how to spend the so-called “peace dividend,” supposing there is such a dividend. The administration doesn’t think there is, and Secretary of Defense Cheney has warned against spending the money saved on defense until it is in the...
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Juvenal’s admonition to husbands has often been applied to government, but rarely with the full force of the original: “Go ahead and lock her up,” the Roman satirist warned, “but who will watch the watchmen themselves? She’s put on her guard and starts with them.” Once a large number of frail...
The doctrine of states’ rights has returned to the American political scene. Leftist and liberal governors have been dusting off the arguments of John C. Calhoun and echoing the speeches of Strom Thurmond in preparation for their defiance of the national government. The battle is being fought on several grounds. In Massachusetts, the fight is...
“An idea is a putting truth in checkmate.” —Ortega y Gasset Philosophy in the 20th century has shared the fate of other high arts whose audiences are increasingly limited to an inner circle of adepts. This is partly the fault of a culture that aims at mass production and mass communication, but a good part...
The dilapidation of the Soviet Empire at the end of 1989 became the minor premise of the argument that man’s dreams of peace and global unity are finally about to be realized at the end of the second millennium. The peaceful crusade of East Germans across the border has convinced otherwise sober men that democracy’s...
Shortly after the election of 1988 one grand old man of the Republican Party told me he thought Mr. Bush could do a creditable job so long as his administration faced no major crises. The very minor crisis of the abortive coup in Panama was the first serious test of this thesis, and it would...
Or Now That Poetry Is Dead, I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Drink A new battle of the books is in progress. This time, the lines are not being drawn between modern and ancient but between the present and the recent past, and the antagonists are not Homer against Milton or Aristotle vs. Bacon,...
In recent months both San Francisco and New York have been the scene of triumphs for the homosexual rights movement’s efforts to legitimate single-sex liaisons. . . . Newsweek‘s Eleanor Clift, appearing on The McLaughlin Group, summed up the cases as evidence that in the 1980’s the American people were redefining the family. The American...
Why do we call it liberal education? When an eighteen-year-old graduates from high school and goes off to college to pick up a smattering of history and literature, why should we describe his course of study as the liberal arts? Educators once knew the answers to these questions, but it has been many years since...
In the 1950’s any real American boy knew that whatever he wanted to be when he grew up, it was not an underemployed television father like Ward Cleaver or Ozzie Nelson. Our fictional heroes were from another time. They were the cowboys, frontiersmen, and pioneers who had taken risks that seemed inconceivable to a generation...
These days everyone is having second thoughts—about Vietnam and the 60’s, about American history, about what it means to be a liberal and what it means to be a conservative. Rather than be left out of the rewrite, I too have been having second thoughts about what I did and did not do some 20...
One man, one vote. It seems such an obvious, such a simple principle. What can possibly hinder its implementation in South Africa, where blacks are barred from the exercise of citizenship rights, or Israel, where West Bank Palestinian children take to the streets demanding self-government and civil rights, or New York City, where the Board...
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to review a Missouri abortion case has raised the spirits of the pro-life movement. In his appeal, Missouri’s attorney general asked the Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade, the landmark civil rights decision that made pregnant women and their physicians sole arbiters over who is born and who is not...
This remarkable editorial by Chronicles’ longest-serving editor offered one of the first and best analyses of America’s immigration problem.
“Our literature is infested with a swarm of just such little people as this—creatures who succeed in creating for themselves an absolutely positive reputation, by mere dint of the continuity and perpetuality of their appeals to the public.” —E.A. Poe In our age the business of literature has become as stale and well-organized as the...
Even if I had done all the things the prosecution says I did, I would still not be guilty of any crime, because I am fighting against colonialism. We have heard such arguments in recent years from a variety of sources: IRA bombers, African National Congress supporters (bishops and necklacers), and Marxist rebels all over...
Coelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt was Horace’s observation on the narrowing effects of travel: “Those who go across the sea change their weather but not their mind.” It is the rare tourist who gets more out of his expeditions than a confirmation of his prejudices. One of the most intelligent visitors to...
Election ’88 has been so far a political flea circus in which the issues are as microscopic as the candidates. The one interesting candidate has been the Rev. Jesse Jackson. If you have seen his very effective commercials, you will remember the pictures of Jackson meeting with President Assad of Syria, and the voice-over reminding...
I saw my old friend Browne recently. The subject eventually turned to the politics of religion and the religion of politics. I asked him what he thought about the current Anglican debate over homosexuality, and I wondered aloud if it had anything to do with the obvious unmanliness of the clergy—the final phase of what...
Like most Americans of my generation, my experience of poverty has been self-inflicted. “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.” Dylan’s little fantasy of “Maggie’s Farm’ takes on grim reality when the scholar-gypsy turns to waiting tables or substitute teaching, being in general what my parents were unkind enough to...
In writing of sensual pleasures, Thomas Hobbes observed that “the greatest” is “that by which we are invited to give continuance to our species, and the next by which a man is invited to meat, for the preservation of his individual person.” From more than one perspective, Hobbes had his priorities straight. Parents, on more...
“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion: within these barriers, an author may write what he pleases; but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that...