Category: Breaking Glass

Two years ago, Europe was in the middle of its cartoon jihad, as thousands of Muslims protested images believed to insult Muhammad.  At the time, despairing observers saw the affair as yet another milestone in Europe’s descent into Eurabia, a graveyard of Christianity and Western civilization.  In hindsight, though, it rather looks as if the...

Every American knows that Egypt is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, by far the most populous Arab Muslim state.  Many Americans, on consideration, might also be aware that, before the arrival of Islam, Egypt was just as solidly Christian, the cultural and spiritual heart of the early Church.  How did one situation give way to the...

In 1899, Winston Churchill expressed his concern about the “militant and proselytizing faith” of Islam.  “Were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science,” he said, “the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”  His contemporary, Lord...

Only a fool would try to foretell the course of U.S. politics a few months in advance, let alone several years in the future.  The fact that Democrats are riding high after their electoral triumph last November does not necessarily mean that they will win the White House in 2008.  But just suppose that January...

The academy is in an even worse plight than you may imagine.  Every so often, surveys reveal just how far America’s professors are out of touch with the political and cultural mainstream.  Not only do they overwhelmingly register with the Democratic Party, but most adhere to the straitest sect within that tradition, those who regard...

Was there a point at which American liberals consciously adopted Jacobinism, or did it just creep up on them gradually?  This question was brought into rather sharp focus earlier this year when the PBS series American Experience presented an expensive two-part documentary entitled “Reconstruction: The Second Civil War.”  The series recounted the story of Reconstruction,...

If you want to see how America’s liberal elites would like to reshape the United States, look at Western Europe.  For decades, they have dreamed of importing European social models, of a Swedish welfare society, and of comprehensive sexual tolerance à la Hollandaise.  But the liberal vision is most perfectly manifested in the form of...

As 2005 drew to a close, the scandal over the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame potentially threatened to overwhelm leading figures in the Bush White House.  Meanwhile, editors and journalists have been struggling to keep a straight face while affecting shock at the central revelation of the case—namely, that major news stories commonly derive...

Watching the horrible images of the recent bomb attacks in London, Americans might be forgiven for feeling a sense of alarm, especially when the terrorism was directly linked to homegrown suicide bombers.  The thought of American extremists adopting similar tactics on our soil is extremely worrying, though few media outlets dared to explore the prospect...

I am nervous about the course I am teaching, this coming fall, about World War II.  As I will explain to the class from the outset, there are a few things I do not know about the topic—namely, when the war began, when it ended, where it happened, who were the key protagonists on each...

Michael Stokes Paulsen, a learned professor at the University of Minnesota, is a connoisseur of legal atrocities.  In a recent article in the Notre Dame Law Review, he tries to award the palm for “The Worst Constitutional Decision of All Time,” while he teaches a course on “Atrocious Cases.”  In the spirit of Dr. Paulsen’s...

Between 1975 and 1991, Lebanon suffered a bloody civil war that had massive repercussions regionally and globally.  Among other things, the hostage crisis in the 1980’s detonated the Iran-Contra crisis that almost destroyed the Reagan presidency.  Today, Lebanon is relatively peaceful, though under a repressive Syrian hegemony, and the whole story may seem of little...

The U.S. Capitol may be the most easily parodied symbol of America.  It is a gift to cartoonists, who can use the dome to symbolize graft, foolishness, hot air, scandal, self-seeking—everything, in fact, that can go wrong with a democratically elected legislature.  In the past few years, though, all that has changed utterly, and not,...

Nothing is riskier in life—at any rate, for those interested in discovering that elusive thing, the “truth”—than to assume that what one has personally experienced years ago can be a useful guide in judging present problems.  It is particularly true when the time gap between the two exceeds 50 years.  This said, I feel almost...

Nations define themselves by what they choose to remember.  The growing complexity of the United States is suggested by the ever-expanding volume of her historical memories, the range of groups and events that are commemorated, often in the name of multiculturalism.  Just look at the changing landscape of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., with...

Did anybody notice when Catholic Christianity ceased to be a religion in the United States?  Not when it stopped being a popular or even a permissible religion, but when it became simply a nonreligion?  I ask this because a recent court decision in California threatens to launch a legal revolution, in a way that would...

Having failed to establish much of a numerical presence in American society, the Episcopal Church, USA, succeeds in attracting attention by the continuing antics of a long parade of outrageous ecclesiastics.  In 2003, attention focused on the ordination of openly homosexual Vicky Imogene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire.  While I am reluctant to add...

Though America’s academics tend to the dyspeptic and hypercritical, on one day this past year, the campus mood was extraordinarily sunny.  This past June, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, declaring unconstitutional a law prohibiting homosexual conduct.  In the eyes of most academics, Lawrence represented an act...

Let me apologize.  A massive technical glitch, involving distortions of the fourth dimension, has prevented me from researching the column I intended to write about ethnic and racial profiling.  The column would have pointed out that many people who complain about profiling fail to define just what the term means.  They confuse blatant examples of...

Hold on, let me make sure my word processor is in full Cliché Mode: “The specter of Senator McCarthy walks again in contemporary America.”  Yes, that seems to be working properly. Particularly over the past couple of years, we’ve heard a great deal about McCarthy and McCarthyism.  The name surfaces whenever a government agency identifies...

Dear Editor: Attached please find the proposal for my latest book, Franklin Roosevelt: The Anti-christ Unmasked.  While I know some people will dismiss my thesis as foolish (or even “crazy”), the wave of recent books published by major presses like yours gives me reason to hope that the truth can at last be told. I...

Over the past decade, I have been involved in public debate over the problem of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and that experience has taught me a great deal about the way people come to understand—or, rather, misunderstand—social problems.  My point is simple enough.  While some priests have undoubtedly been abusive, and a few have...

I would like to try my hand at detective stories, but I’m having some problems coming up with plausible conclusions.  Let me give you an example: I’m currently writing a book in which it’s obvious from the first page that the butler did it, and, as the book goes on, this conclusion is steadily reinforced...

When future generations write the history of the Roman Catholic Church in North America, the year 2002 will loom large, since the crisis over child abuse by priests and other clergy has had such a devastating effect on the faithful.  Yet these same events also deserve to be remembered as marking a remarkable new low...

It is easy enough to criticize the postmodern approaches that have become orthodoxy in humanities departments over the last couple of decades, but if postmodernism has taught us anything of value, it is that we are prisoners of our language.  The words we use constrain the expression of our thoughts.  Since postmodern academics tend to...

It’s starting again. Almost 20 years ago, the federal government launched what became known as the “war on drugs,” a radical experiment to suppress illegal drugs through harsh penal solutions. Among other things, this meant long prison sentences for the sale or possession of tiny quantities of controlled substances, sentences that are astonishingly severe by...

I feel sorry for Afrocentrists—those weird and wonderful folk who claim that civilization, philosophy, and science were discovered in ancient Africa, before being stolen by the white man. True, members of the movement are cranks, with nothing worthwhile to support their positions, but they are no more ridiculous than many other historians who dominate the...