Back in 1839, an Englishman by the name of Alexander Walker wrote a manual by the name of Woman, in which he quoted Hume: “Among the inferior creatures, nature herself, being the supreme legislator, prescribes all the laws which regulate their marriages, and varies those laws according to the different circumstances of the creature.” So...
Category: Columns
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John Wayne and World War II
Ever since I can remember, John Wayne has been the actor the left most loves to hate. While the left’s criticisms of him are many, the one that seemed to have the most validity was his failure to serve his country during World War II. “He’s a big phony,” I was told by leftist classmates...
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Forgetting China
I am unusual among American conservatives in feeling quite positive about the rise of a strong and prosperous China. Not long since, I was exploring Beijing’s thronged Wangfujing Street, which is consumer heaven, and it was sobering to realize that the ancestors of virtually all those prosperous customers would have been permanently hungry peasants who...
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Meet Me at Mary’s Place
I got a picture of you in my locket I keep it close to my heart A light shining in my breast Leading me through the dark . . . The fog outside the window glows in the moments before dawn. The sun will soon rise, but I won’t be able to see it. The...
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All in a Stew
I don’t want to be harsh on people, but the emotional life of our epoch reminds me of central Moscow in the old Soviet days, a time when there was everything. There were billboards advertising cigarettes and the national lottery. There were competent doctors and crooked lawyers. There were chauffeur-driven limousines; there were girl Fridays...
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Voting for Monarchy
Presidential elections in the United States sometimes seem more like the Wars of the Roses than political contests. The resemblance to dynastic conflict goes beyond the predictable acrimony between two sets of political interests: the taxpayers of the Republican Party and the tax consumers on whom the Democrats rely. It is true, of course, that...
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The Blowback
On September 24 I embarked on a week-long tour of Tunisia, hoping to learn more on the aftermath of last year’s revolution and the state of political play ahead of the elections, which are due before the year’s end. The findings are surprising. The country looks and feels civilized, roadside trash notwithstanding. It is safe...
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Lawless Enforcement
Lawless Produced by Benaroya Pictures Directed by John Hillcoat Screenplay by Nick Cave from the novel by Matt Bondurant Distributed by The Weinstein Company Whenever I think of Prohibition movies, I inevitably see Jimmy Cagney smiling rakishly as he shrugs his shoulders to make sure his double-breasted jacket drapes just so. He’s the city-boy...
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Stimulus Scam
Bernie Ecclestone is a gnomish Brit ex-grease monkey who is my neighbor in Gstaad, the small alpine Swiss village that once upon a time was the Mecca of the old rich and titled, now slowly turning into the playground of the nouveau riche and vulgar. I’ve often written about Bernie because, for a very short...
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“We Want the World, and We Want It Now!”
The Jerk virtually defines the American character of the 21st century. Ask any foreigner, and he will tell you amazing tales of badly dressed, obnoxious Americans who treat restaurant owners as their personal servants, snap their fingers, screaming Garçon! Garçon! for service, and complain about everything they eat. Too many American travelers have seen too...
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Grand Strategy Revisited
In an election campaign dominated by domestic issues, foreign themes have appeared as isolated snippets. Questions regarding what to do about Syria or Iran, or how to manage relations with China and Russia, produce stock responses unrelated to the broad picture. These are among the most important questions facing political decisionmakers, foreign-policy practitioners, and their...
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Bats and Weasels
The Dark Knight Rises Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Christopher Nolan Written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Hope Springs Produced by Escape Artists and Mandate Pictures Directed by David Frankel Written by Vanessa Taylor Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Christopher Nolan doesn’t do things by halves. His third Batman movie, The Dark Knight...
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Likud’s Long Con
Here we go again! Scary sofa-samurai Robert Kagan, a neocon foreign-policy “scholar,” is also an expert on war, having watched a lot of Hollywood movies. Kagan says that, if Obama were to use force against Iran, the election would be over—he would win overwhelmingly. Kagan and his brother are inside-the-Beltway hucksters, always hustling and doing...
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Ace of Aces: Richard Bong
He was an all-American boy who became an American hero in World War II. Born in 1920 to a father who, at the age of five, had immigrated to the United States with his family from Sweden and an American-born mother of Irish, Scottish, and English descent, Dick Bong was reared on a farm a...
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VENONA
I faithfully read the New York Review of Books as a prime source of hilarious writing and self-parody. Sometimes though, the absurdities reach such a height as to demand comment. Recently, a Gail Collins rant in NYRB described “How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us,” claiming that the economic power of that state’s educational system...
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Souvenir of Florence
Among the great city states of Italy—for city states they remain, a world unto itself every one, despite the advent of the steam locomotive and the electric carrot peeler—Florence was never my favorite. When I lived there, I loathed its American present as the art student’s medina, with its disheveled, Nebraskan, notionally female multitudes swarming...
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Men Men Men Men Manly Men Men Men
Some insomniacs do endless sequences of sums in their heads, while more traditional conservatives rely on counting sheep—or sheep in elephants’ clothing. An instinctive Machiavellian even as a child, and dimly conscious of the reality of power, I preferred to count rulers. In elementary school I learned the American presidents, and in high school I...
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Worst Secretary of State in History
Attending a “holiday party” at the State Department in December 2010, President Obama congratulated himself on appointing Hillary Clinton and declared that “there’s a consensus building that [she] may be one of the best secretaries of state we’ve ever had in this country’s history.” She is relentless, tough, and does not quit, Obama said, “so,...
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Responsibilities
Savages Produced by Relativity Media Directed by Oliver Stone Written by Shane Salerno and Don Winslow from Winslow’s novel Distributed by Universal Pictures The Amazing Spider-Man Produced by Marvel Entertainment Directed by Marc Webb Written by James Vanderbilt and Alvin Sargent Distributed by Columbia Pictures Directed by Oliver Stone, Savages is an adaptation of...
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Calling a Spade a Spade
Nicholas Soames is Winston Churchill’s grandson—his mother being Winny’s only living child—a Conservative member of Parliament since the mid-70’s, a very large man whose food and drink intake is legendary, and an old friend of mine with whom I used to get into terrible trouble (but the less said about that the better). Soames has...
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The United States of Generica
The scents of lilacs, fudge, and horse manure mingle to form the distinctive aroma of Mackinac Island in early June. The tourist season is not yet in full swing; it starts in earnest with the Lilac Festival, the first day of which will be our final day on the island. A mild winter and an...
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Under Sicilian Eyes
The last time I was in Austria was embarrassingly long ago, but I recall one characteristic moment. We were staying in a tiny hotel that occupied the second and third floors of a handsome Viennese townhouse, and once, well past midnight, we rang the wrong bell. Whereupon the paterfamilias of the first-floor apartment appeared on...
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Escapist Fantasies
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. (The weather not their mind they change who rush across the sea.) Horace’s tagline is generally cited to illustrate the American cliché that, wherever you may go, you cannot run away from yourself. In a country where divorce is more common than marriage, where millions every year...
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The Myth of the “Arab Spring”
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. The ongoing enthusiasm of the Western elites for Islam, in general, and for the misnamed Arab Spring, in particular, is a case in point. The bitter fruits of the latter—simultaneously visible but differently manifested in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria—are rooted in the character of the...
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Utopia Forestalled
For Greater Glory Produced by NewLand Films Directed by Dean Wright Screenplay by Michael Love Distributed by ARC Entertainment Are you familiar with the Cristeros? They were Mexican Catholics who rebelled against their secularist government in 1926. I knew very little of them myself until I saw For Greater Glory: The True Story of...
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The Battle off Samar
One would think that a battle called the most gallant in the history of the U.S. Navy would be prominently featured in our textbooks. Not only does the Battle off Samar in the Philippine Sea on October 25, 1944, go unmentioned in schoolbooks, but it’s rare for anyone under 60 even to have heard of...
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Syria, Now and Then
Back in September 1970 I found myself in Damascus, as charming a city as it is ancient, the natives friendly and helpful, especially as I was suffering from food poisoning thanks to a Lebanese kebab from two days before. My stay in the city was interrupted by the sudden death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the...
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Progress and Poverty
While it never pays to get upset about the American public’s periodic fits of moral outrage, the rhetoric sometimes becomes so near obsessive, and so ridiculous, that it demands a response. In this instance, I am thinking of the last few years’ debates about the national standard of living, an issue that has surfaced so...
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Stand My Ground
Purchasing a house in a city with double-digit unemployment and some of the highest property taxes in the country may well be a definition of insanity. Buying such a house on foreclosure, unable to make the purchase contingent on the sale of your current home, undoubtedly is. Yet here we are—considering taking that leap into...
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Under the Volcano
It’s a small world, as the boat’s captain explained to me between puffs on one of the Antico Toscanos that my friends had been thoughtful enough to bring aboard, seeing I’m too poor to buy cigars, even the cheap Tuscan kind. The African continental shelf, said the captain, is in continual movement toward Europe, and...
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Never Never Shall Be Slaves
The shooting of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman have divided the country along predictable lines: blacks and whites, “liberals” (that is to say, self-hating European-American leftists) and “conservatives” (or, rather, confused liberals). The racial conflict is entirely without interest except insofar as it tends to confirm what everyone in America knows by...
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NATO’s Pointless Summit
NATO leaders concluded a two-day summit in Chicago on May 21, with the pending withdrawal from Afghanistan dominating the proceedings. According to NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, two other items dominated the agenda: The alliance will continue to expand its capabilities in spite of economic austerity, and “we have engaged with our partners around...
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Things Are Looking Up
Damsels in Distress Produced by Westerly Films Written and directed by Whit Stillman Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Is there a better remedy for depression than watching Fred Astaire’s films? Violet Wister (Greta Gerwig), the heroine of Whit Stillman’s magisterial Damsels in Distress, doesn’t think so. Neither do I. The medical and psychiatric communities...
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Democracy and Ferraris
Greece is certainly female. Like the fair sex, she changes her mind nonstop. One day she sleeps with the German suitor; the next she decides to declare her independence from the Kraut and go it alone. Finally, she chooses both—the moneybags and her freedom. After all, she’s Greek, and she thinks that rules do not...
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Looks Can Be Deceiving
Whoever came up with the liberal platitude that “Children have to be taught to hate” was either a liar or a fool, or both. He certainly never had children of his own, and, if it weren’t impossible, I’d say he must never have been a child himself. There was plenty of ethnic strife in my...
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Eating Cake
I made my way to Florence from Cortina d’Ampezzo, where for the past half-century the Italian bourgeoisie had pretended to ski while in reality merely promenading in opulent furs in front of the Hotel de la Poste in postprandial stupefaction. This year, however, the resort was a ghost town, and not only on account of...
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Do Androids Tweet…?
The America depicted in the news is every day coming closer to the dystopian future imagined by science-fiction novelists. I am not referring so much to the rising tide of violence and irrationality that has overtaken our society at all levels as to the systematic spiritual, intellectual, and social desolation of our public culture. One...
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Rumors of War Receding
This column was written on Orthodox Easter, but the reminder that Christ is risen is not the only reason for its upbeat tone. There is good news on several foreign fronts, making a major new war less likely today than at any time since the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq was announced last October....
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Bullseye!
The Hunger Games Produced and distributed by Lionsgate Directed by Gary Ross Written by Suzanne Collins and Gary Ross Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is the first volume of a trilogy set in a not-too-distant future. An unspecified apocalyptic event has destroyed much of North America, and a new state named Panem has arisen...
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The Shot Heard Round the World
While nearly all my college students had heard of Lexington and Concord and the first battle of our Revolutionary War, only rarely did any of them know why the British were marching on the small Massachusetts towns. During the summer of 1774, Gen. Thomas Gage, supported by a squadron of the Royal Navy and five...
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Guess Who Came to Dinner?
In John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, a young black con man traduces his way into a white, rich, liberal family’s midst by posing as the college son of Sidney Poitier who has lost his credit card and wallet. The guilt-ridden rich folk put him up with the predictable results. The family is almost...
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French Boors and Chinese Whores
Here we go again, sports fans! During a recent tennis match between two professionals in Indian Wells, California, a racial slur uttered by one of the players has the usual suspects up in arms. The first off the bat was, of course, the newspaper that prints only what fits p.c., the dreadful Big Bagel Times. ...
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Texas’s Pound of Pluck
Hello friends and neighbors in Mason and surrounding counties. Attention! Be a vic-tor, not a vic-tim! We will be having a beginners’ concealed-handgun class this coming Wednesday . . . at Keller’s Riverside Store on the beautiful Llano River. . . . We will attempt to teach you all the necessary information you need to...
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A Capital Mars
John Carter Produced and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures Directed by Andrew Stanton Written by Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon When Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Under the Moons of Mars in 1911, introducing the character John Carter, he did so in a mood of desperation. At 35, with a wife and two...
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Beating Down Greece
I was sad to read that the Attikon Cinema on Stadiou Street in central Athens was burned down by anarchist scum pretending to protest against the E.U. Nazis. The Attikon was built in 1870 as part of a beautiful, ochre-colored neoclassical edifice constructed by a German architect, only to be torched 142 years later by...
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And Pastures New
Suppose you had to choose the single motion picture that dealt most seriously and challengingly with religious matters. What might it be? Offhand, I can think of a dozen or so possible answers from various countries, and probably most cinema-literate people would agree on at least a common short list. It’s a reasonable bet, though,...
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That New Car Smell
“Why are all the cars in the Super Bowl ads 2013s, if it’s only February of 2012?” It’s the kind of question only a 12-year-old boy like Stephen would think to ask; the rest of us long ago became accustomed to model-year creep, as the automakers knew that we would. When I was Stephen’s age,...
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Baudelaire in Russia
I have known since adolescence—though in Soviet Russia it was all a bit hard to believe, these United States of ours being, after all, the Manichaean pole of Light—that Edgar Allan Poe was completely unknown in America and would have perished in obscurity had he not found a literary agent in Charles Baudelaire and a...
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An American Revolution
On January 17—less than 24 hours after presenting his credentials—the new U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, met with a group of Russian opposition figures, “civil-society activists,” and street-demonstration leaders at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. It was a provocative first move, the equivalent of a new Russian ambassador in Washington ostentatiously hosting the leaders...
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Dead Stars,Black Holes
The recent death of Whitney Houston elicited the handwringing and lamentations that are the hallmark of American journalism. Poor Amy, poor Whitney, poor Michael, poor Notorious—they were so young, and they had so much to live for. What a tragedy! The word tragedy is no longer applied to the death of worthy people who made...