For years, Americans worried about the disappearance of manufacturing jobs were told that their loss would be more than offset by all the new jobs technology would create in the United States. What’s more, the jobs created by technology would stay in the United States, because they required skills that the Chinese and Mexicans—those now...
Category: Columns
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Wiseguys
The American home-mortgage crisis, though it is only a little less urgent than it was a year ago, has taken second place, in the ambulance-chasing media, to ObamaCare, same-sex “marriage,” and even the wars in Syria and Afghanistan. We have all been informed that the Great Recession was caused in large part by high rates...
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Global Security Challenges in 2014
The year ahead is likely to bring unforeseen foreign-policy challenges. Two years ago nobody anticipated the “Arab Spring,” and that phenomenon’s causes, significance, and future developments are still a matter of dispute. The North Korean regime is fundamentally less stable than at any time since the 1950-53 war, and its sudden unraveling could cause a...
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Reckless Regard
All Is Lost Produced by Before The Door Picture Written and Directed by J.C. Chandor Distributed by Lionsgate Robert Redford and Bruce Dern are proving that we needn’t retire to our rocking chairs at 77—not if we have star power, that is. Each costar of 1974’s The Great Gatsby has his own leading role in...
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A Farewell to Balls
I recently sat down with a friend of more than 50 years, Reinaldo Herrera, and was filmed by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, also an old friend, while lunching and discussing the past. The Herrera house is a grand one, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and Graydon’s idea was to film...
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The Making of Books
When I came to Chronicles, I looked forward to the arrival of a steady stream of books for review: new fiction and poetry, histories and biographies, and the occasional works of popular scholarship or science. From the first I was disappointed in the quality of the books sent in “over the transom,” and I turned...
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Stairway to Heaven
There is, or at least there used to be before the days of Nestlé in every pot and a Nissan in every garage, the idea of a stairway to Heaven. Jacob’s ladder, which the biblical patriarch famously dreamed about during the flight from his brother Esau, is a locus classicus, of course, but the idea...
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The Night the World Didn’t Change
Most sober historians have little respect for counterfactuals, those extrapolations of alternative worlds where matters developed differently from the world we know. Yet such alternatives are actually hard to avoid. How can you claim that Gettysburg was a significant battle unless you contemplate the other paths that American history might have taken if the South...
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An Uncertain Asian Pivot
Nicholas Spykman died 70 years ago, more than two years before Japan’s defeat, but his analysis of America’s role in the world, and the challenges she will face in the Far East, sounds almost prophetic today. The Dutch-born Yale professor caused a scandal when he wrote in 1942—only months after Pearl Harbor—that America’s chief regional...
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O Captain, My Captain
Captain Phillips Produced by Trigger Street Productions Directed by Paul Greengrass Screenplay by Billy Ray Distributed by Columbia Pictures Captain Phillips, the film, has come under fire since its opening, as has the eponymous captain of the Danish container ship Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by Somali pirates in 2009. Complaints against Richard Phillips have...
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Japan’s Prelude to Pearl Harbor
Was Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor out of character for the chrysanthemum nation? Her actions at Port Arthur, nearly 38 years earlier, suggest otherwise. In 1898 Russia began leasing the Liaotung Peninsula, which juts into the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean Peninsula, from the Chinese. On the southern tip of the Liaotung...
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Where’s Kafka When You Need Him?
Like all proper banana republics, the Olive Republic of Greece has jailed some elected members of parliament, charging them with criminality, as obscure and vague an accusation as hooliganism used to be when Uncle Joe Stalin was displeased with some Russian writer. Stalin used dissidents for target practice; the present gang in power in the...
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Answering Islam
Americans find it difficult to understand the Islamic threat. It is not just that they have made the mistake of listening to presidential speeches on the “religion of peace” or dulled their wits reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The fault does not lie exclusively or even primarily with American schools,...
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The Middle East: Steady as She Goes
To paraphrase Camus, he who despairs of the condition of the Middle East is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool. In a permanent disaster zone, the best one can hope for is that things will not get worse—not too soon, anyway. Things did get better in the Middle East...
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Attachment and Loss
Blue Jasmine Produced by Perdido Productions Written and directed by Woody Allen Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Grim. That’s the first thing to say about Woody Allen’s new movie, Blue Jasmine. The second is that its lead, Cate Blanchett, gives one of the best performances by an actress since Vivian Leigh played Blanche DuBois...
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Of Locks and la King
A man whose reputation rivals that of the Clintons for dishonesty and lies recently claimed he overheard a gangster confirming that Bobby Riggs had thrown his match against Billie Jean King in the infamous Battle of the Sexes on September 20, 1973. King won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. According to the Clinton-wannabe, Bobby was $100,000 in...
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The Academic Industrial Complex
In his farewell address, Dwight Eisenhower warned against a military-industrial complex that would seek to enrich itself through false appeals to the common good. Today, it is higher education that is growing rich by convincing the public that its actions are for their good. The costs that universities and colleges are charging students range from...
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Terminators, Inc.
“Hieronymo’s mad againe.” The cover of the August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, titled “Drone Warrior,” features a picture of President Obama and the question, “Has It Become Too Easy for a President to Kill?” I should have thought “Stop me before I kill again” or, perhaps, “I’ll be back” would...
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An Aix to Grind
As though in memory of those antediluvian Playboy “pictorials” in which the hapless young lady posed with whatever attribute of her metier the photographer had unearthed in the props room—an alleged student of architecture with a carpenter’s wooden compass, a presumed graduate of the police academy with a sheriff’s badge, a putative nurse with a...
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The Stafford Disaster
If you didn’t hear about the social and medical catastrophe that occurred at Stafford Hospital, in the English Midlands—a disaster that claimed some 1,200 lives—then you must have been following the U.S. news media. The Stafford experience should be a nightmarish wake-up call for Americans, and a crushingly definitive argument in the nation’s debate over...
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A Failure of Intelligence
“Al Qaeda is on the run, Osama bin Laden is dead,” President Obama announced at a rally in Des Moines on the eve of last year’s presidential election. Less than a year later it is evident that, contrary to Obama’s assurances, Al Qaeda is alive and well, along with other Islamic terrorist networks. The jihadists...
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Elysian Fields Forever
Elysium Produced and distributed by TriStar Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment Directed and written by Neill Blomkamp Neill Blomkamp’s second film, Elysium, is, in a way, a sequel to his first, District 9. This time, however, there are no eight-foot-tall prawn-like aliens accusing earthlings in Johannesburg, South Africa, of the crime of apartheid or insensitivity...
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A Different Hollywood
We’ve all heard it dozens of times after another disappointed moviegoer leaves the theater: “They don’t make ’em like they used to.” One reason is the absence today of the kind of men who once made the movies. Try this test yourself: Think of a few of your favorite movies, and then identify the directors,...
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Friending Narcissus
Cicero was a wise human being who wrote that a man with a garden and a library has all he needs. He also said that only a man without a brain tweets. (Well, he would have said it, were he around today.) The Oxford philosopher John Gray, a man I used to get drunk with...
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The Best Schooling Money Can Buy
Well, the jury, they see their facts. My thoughts of the jury, they old, that’s old-school people. We in a new school, our generation, my generation. Poor Rachel Jeantel has been ridiculed for her diction, elocution, and irrationality, but in her interview with Piers Morgan she makes a valid point in contrasting “old-school people” who...
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A Tale of Two Islamists
Two waves of popular protests against Islamist regimes, one in Turkey and the other in Egypt, have produced notably different outcomes. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has weathered the storm, while President Mohamed Morsi was removed from office by the military. In view of the similarities between Erdogan’s AKP (Justice and Development Party) and Morsi’s...
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Reason’s Enemy
Copperhead Produced by Swordspoint Productions Directed by Ronald F. Maxwell Screenplay by Bill Kauffman Distributed by Brainstorm Media What makes a good war story? Cannons, bombs, bloody bodies, and bounding heroes? Stephen Crane’s short story “An Episode of War” demonstrates it can be achieved by other means. It fully registers the madness, horror, and folly...
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Democracy Is Overrated
If I hear or read one more American hack mentioning the word democracy where Egypt and the Middle East are concerned, I swear on Joe Biden’s hair-implanted head that I shall go in front of the Capitol and commit seppuku, the Japanese warrior’s way of leaving this life. (Just kidding: I shall wait for the...
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Goodbye to All What?
As far back as I can remember, I had the feeling that I had been born some time after the end of everything that mattered. Yes, there was still an abundance of material comforts and some vestiges of marriage and religion, but vanishing before our eyes—like the stars in the sky faded by street lights—were...
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Of Rats and Men
There are people, in all likelihood a majority, who are by nature obedient. Their lot is to play Sid Sawyer to whatever Aunt Polly comes along, whether the authority in question is a democratically elected leader or an up-to-his-elbows-in-blood dictator. As though stuck in some epochal centrifuge, they go with the flow, tirelessly, unwaveringly, always...
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Syria: Avoiding Another Quagmire
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last April, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned of the potential consequences of U.S. military involvement in the Syrian conflict. It could hinder humanitarian relief operations, he said, embroil the United States in a significant, lengthy, and uncertain military commitment, and strain relationships around the world. “And finally,” he...
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Heartless Irony
What Maisie Knew Produced by Red Crown Productions Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel Screenplay by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright Distributed by Millennium Entertainment Some people should not have children. This is one way to read Henry James’s 1897 novel What Maisie Knew. Another way, the way James preferred, is to marvel...
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Bob Mathias
One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. Although plagued by anemia, which caused him...
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Halcyon Summer
Why is it that summers used to last so much longer back then? School would be out in early June, and by the time horrid September rolled around, it seemed three years had passed. What fun it was to be young, and for it to be summer! No homework, no need to stay in shape,...
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The Culture War Crosses the Atlantic
The course of 2013 in France, Ireland, and Britain provides important lessons for those resisting the left’s attempt to remove Christian influence from public life in America. On April 23, the Socialist government of François Hollande succeeded in making France the 14th country to legalize gay marriage, something he had promised to do during his...
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A Modest Proposal for Speech Control
Can we be adult about this? Can we finally say publicly what so many people believe privately—namely, that the whole Bill of Rights thing was a nice idea in its day, but it’s time to move on? Now, before you take offense, let’s think practically about this. Yes, the Bill of Rights has all these...
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A Scandalous Presidency
“Unfortunately you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all of our problems,” President Barack Obama told students at Ohio State on May 5. Some of these same voices do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that...
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A Vast, Vulgar, Meretricious Beauty
The Great Gatsby Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by Baz Luhrmann Screenplay by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce Why do studios keep trying to turn F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby into a film? Fitzgerald’s extraordinarily vivid prose and his unmatched descriptive powers would seem to make it a natural choice,...
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A Fine Kettle of Fish
If you thought comedy was dead, think again. There’s always John Podhoretz, the ferociously bellicose neocon who makes Patton and Rommel sound like popinjays when he thunders away, urging Uncle Sam to attack and crush his enemies wherever they might be hiding. Beating the war drums is very old hat here in the good old...
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Topsy-Turvy
Titles shall ennoble, then, All the common councilmen . . . Peers shall teem in Christendom, And a Duke’s exalted station Be attainable by competitive examination. “Oh, horror!” cry the addlepated young noblemen in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. Horror, indeed. Their world will be turned upside down if the Queen of the Fairies carries...
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Time and Tide
I should like to live in a different time. Not in the sense of being corporeally present in an earlier epoch, with all its physical plant, its local color, and a bustling mise en scène, but in that metaphysical sense, akin to tempo in music, which previous epochs never neglected to set. Our own time...
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Oblivious
Oblivion Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Written and directed by Joseph Kosinski from his graphic novel The Company You Keep Produced by Voltage Pictures Directed by Robert Redford Screenplay by Lem Dobbs from the novel by Neil Gordon Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Oblivion seems to me an experiment in form following function. ...
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Music That Stirs the Soul
A favorite time for me at John Randolph Club annual meetings is the songfest. Invariably, there is someone in attendance who can sit down at the piano and play all the great, old American tunes that were once familiar to several generations of Americans. The melodies stir my soul. The accompanying lyrics evoke memories of...
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Boston and the Big Lie
I write this during the weekend that finally saw the end of those two dreadful Chechens who were described by many newspapers—starting with the New York Times, of course—as typical American teenagers. Some Americans, is all that comes to mind. Why is it that after every outrage family members and friends of the perpetrators are...
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Classical Christian Marriage
You can almost always rely on conservative politicians to surrender their principles, even before the first shot is fired. Within a month of President Obama’s second inauguration, Republicans were already selling out on the marriage issue. When the GOP leadership contrived the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), I said at the time that in making...
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The Honest State
In the shadow of St. Peter’s in Zurich, a beautiful church with the largest clock face in Europe, I found myself chatting with a German tourist. Curious to hear that I lived in Sicily, he asked me what I thought of Zurich. “I love it,” I said. “I feel so at home here. It’s just...
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The Revolution of Greed
Do you remember Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street proclaiming that “Greed is good”? Unwittingly, he may have formulated a law about how religions rise and fall. Worldwide, the churches that succeed and boom, that win and retain members, tend to be the “greedy groups”—greedy, above all, for your time and commitment. They don’t...
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Obama, Relationship Therapist
The House of Peers, throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, and did it very well. W.S. Gilbert’s lines from Iolanthe seem applicable to President Barack Obama’s four-day Middle East trip, which ended on March 23. The tour was a “diplomatic triumph,” according to Reuters. “Obama returns . . . with diplomatic victory,” declared CNN. ...
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The Long Take
Beyond the Hills Produced by Canal+ Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu Distributed by Sundance Selects Beyond the Hills is Cristian Mungiu’s fictionalized account of the widely reported story of an exorcism performed at a Rumanian Orthodox monastery near Tanacu in 2005. A disturbed young woman who had been living there had become violently...
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Excessive Misery
I’m miserable. But if you paid attention to the national news or dialed up the Drudge Report in late February, you probably knew that already. How could I not be, sitting here in my office in downtown Rockford, Illinois? After all, according to Forbes, Rockford is the third most miserable city in the United States....