“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,...
Category: Columns
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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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Inventing the European Union
The rhetoric of “Europe” in its recognizably modern form dates back to the Thirty Years’ War. After all that they had done to each other between 1618 and 1648, Europeans were rightly embarrassed to talk of “Christendom” as a serious political concept. The last mention of a Christian commonwealth was made in the Peace of...
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Illusions and Disillusions
The Artist Produced by Le Petite Rein and Studio 37 Directed and written by Michel Hazanavicius Distributed by The Weinstein Company A Dangerous Method Produced by Recorded Picture Company Directed by David Cronenberg Screenplay by Christopher Hampton Distributed by Sony Pictures As I write, many critics have declared French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist...
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Revolting Parasites
Movements are always based on lies, and the lies begin with the titles and slogans that are chosen to advance “the cause.” Here in the United States, so-called liberals are really nonrevolutionary Marxists, while the people who call themselves conservatives are, at one extreme, libertarian capitalists who reject any principle or experience that cannot be...
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Rage Against the Cowards
No matter how one looks at it, it wasn’t Italy’s finest hour. Not even Gabrielle d’Annunzio, poet, patriot, propagandist, and protofascist, could spin this into a maritime Titanic-like drama. Once the Costa Concordia hit a rock off the Tuscan coast, the behavior of the passengers and crew became an adverb, as in cowardly. This much...
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The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference. When the Northern Illinois...
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Aere Perennius
“Who?” This was said in a tone of voice that could only be described as doubtful. I was on the phone with an Italian friend in London, explaining that I could not call him back later that evening because I was off to a concert. “It’s Gergiev, Valery Gergiev. Don’t you know? He’s the most...
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Those Real Estate Blues
The Descendants Produced by Ad Hominem Enterprises Written and directed by Alexander Payne Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Young Adult Produced and Distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody (Brooke M. Busey) The Descendants and Young Adult are dark satiric comedies that insist on an unpopular thesis: Sexual misbehavior...
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Divine Wind
Many Americans today are left aghast at Adm. William F. Halsey’s admonition to U.S. forces in the Pacific: “Kill Japs. Kill Japs. Kill More Japs! You will help to kill the yellow bastards if you do your job well.” Yet those who fought through the island campaigns fully appreciated Halsey’s words, realizing the only way...
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Lessons of the War
Tactics is merely The mechanical movement of bodies . . . After nearly nine years, about 4,500 Americans killed and 30,000 wounded and no one seems to know how many trillions of dollars it will cost in the end, the United States is finally doing what we should have done almost immediately, once we made...
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Those Racist Police
When I was last in the Big Bagel, as I call Noo Yawk, an heroic policeman with countless commendations for bravery and 22 years of front-line service was murdered in cold blood by a black drug dealer, Lamont Pride, the latter having previously been let loose by a black female judge who ignored a warrant...
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A Good and Faithful Servant
“MacKay.” I struggled for some time with how to render those six letters, in a vain attempt to convey some sense of what it was like to hear Pete pick up the other end of the phone line. I could never do justice to the experience. Somehow, Pete managed to stretch the two short syllables...
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The Dream Dealer
When I hear of the books in the history of publishing that were self-published, I react like Lenin, who, on hearing of the 5,000 print run of Mayakovsky’s poem 150,000,000, scoffed that it was “a colossal waste of paper.” E.E. Cummings, for instance, published The Enormous Room at his own expense, petulantly dedicating it to...
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A Sad Coincidence
If you’ve read enough Dickens, England is the land of coincidence, so I was not surprised to hear that a friend had sold his Northamptonshire family seat to a Russian. Nor was the congenital gambler in me incredulous when I learned that the new master of the estate was a keen reader of my stuff...
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Avoiding the Iranian Debacle
It takes neither unique intellectual brilliance nor supernaturally honed intuitive skills to predict the consequences of hazardous foreign-policy moves. On numerous occasions over the past decade and a half, I have advised against U.S. military interventions not because of my visceral isolationist zeal, but because I deemed the consequences of those actions to be contrary...
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J. Edgar Who?
J. Edgar Produced by Imagine Entertainment and Malpaso Productions Directed by Clint Eastwood Written by Dustin Lance Black Distributed by Warner Bros. Entertainment Director Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar opens with the June 2, 1919, bomb attack on the Washington, D.C., home of Atty. Gen. Alexander Mitchell Palmer. As Palmer and his wife come dazedly...
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In the Gutter With the GOP
The Republican Party’s search for a presidential candidate is a bit like a musical revue. As the star (Mitt Romney) goes up and down the chorus line, one after another dancer emerges from obscurity into the spotlight, dazzles the audience for a few moments, before sinking back into the anonymous mass. Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann,...
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Hoover Watch
I haven’t seen J. Edgar, the Hollywood movie about J. Edgar Hoover, and I don’t plan to, even though I have loved all of Clint Eastwood’s films, especially those he’s directed. Yet J. Edgar does not do it for me, as they say. It’s based on a lie, and a monstrous one at that: Hoover...
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The Christian in the Cave
I have a continuing interest in popular historical mythology—that is, the yawning gulf that separates what really happened in the past from what large numbers of even quite well-educated individuals think occurred. Given contemporary cultural debates, it is scarcely surprising that such myths commonly focus on religious themes, usually to the massive disadvantage of religion,...
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Bread and Circuses
A real loaf of bread is not that hard to make. Flour, water, yeast—that’s all it takes. A little salt and oil may change the flavor and texture for the better, but you can make a better loaf than any you can buy in an American supermarket with just three ingredients and a little heat. ...
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Devil’s Mama
The rockets that, according to Khrushchev, were coming off his production line “like sausages” ran on kerosene and liquid oxygen. So did Soviet foreign policy. The kerosene was operational secrecy, an ingredient virtually unchanged since the 1920’s, whereby the regime concealed its expansionist aims. The oxygen was maniacal braggadocio, which persuaded the West to see...
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Picking Apples
When I sat down to write my Virtual Realities column for October (“Success(ion)”), I was fairly certain the end was near for Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. I had privately told some friends (and fellow Apple stockholders) a few months earlier that I thought he would not make it to the end of the year. His...
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Russian Reset in Peril
For all its many faults, the Obama administration has scored one notable success: It has done significantly better than its recent Republican and Democratic predecessors in normalizing relations with Russia. Washington’s visceral antagonism toward Moscow needed to be replaced by a more pragmatic, mutually beneficial relationship. The “Reset” has been imperfectly applied, but its conceptual...
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Bombing the West Coast
The “Battle of Los Angeles,” or the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, occurred during the early morning hours of February 25, 1942. It has been portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 1979 slapstick comedy 1941, starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. The farcical movie is about all younger generations today know of the Battle of Los Angeles...
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Of Candidates and Clowns
The Ides of March Produced by Smoke House Directed by George Clooney Written by Grant Heslov, George Clooney, and Beau Willimon from Willimon’s play, Farragut North Distributed by Columbia Pictures George Clooney’s film The Ides of March is a behind-the-scenes look at a presidential primary race in contemporary Ohio. The behavior of the candidates...
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Rome and Jerusalem
I shall not cease from mental fight Nor shall my sword sleep in my mind Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land. William Blake was quite mad, even madder than most Swedenborgians—and that is saying a good deal—but Christians less insane than Blake have dreamed of building a new Jerusalem where...
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No More Ladies and Gentlemen
A recent libel case won by Lady Moore, wife of Sir Roger Moore of James Bond fame, called for my testimony in London, and for once I was happy to oblige. Roger Moore is a friend of very long standing, as is his son, Geoffrey, who lives 50 yards away from me in Gstaad. British...
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Bulldozing Arcadia
Thirteen years ago I marched in one of the largest demonstrations in Britain’s history. The Countryside March had brought together environmental activists and critics of transnational business, dyed-in-the-wool Tories and leftover beatniks, peers and paupers. Today, if the ongoing Coalition versus the Countryside debate is any indication, it’s time to march again. In Greece, Megalopoli...
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Running On Empty
All imperial projects eventually come to grief. The causes, time spans, and forms of decline differ from one great power to the next and from one century to another, but they all have in common one important feature: At some point the weakening hegemon is no longer able to bear the economic and financial burden...
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Shane On Wheels
Drive Produced by Bold Films and Odd Lot Entertainment Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn Screenplay by Hossein Amini from the novel by James Sallis Distributed by Film District At the close of George Stevens’ 1953 big-screen version of Jack Schaefer’s novel, Shane, ten-year-old Joey Starrett (Brandon De Wilde) called repeatedly to his wounded idol,...
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The Tyranny of Democracy
Winston Churchill’s backhanded praise of democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried” is usually cited as the last word on the subject. It is a good way of closing off a dangerous topic of discussion, and it works quite well with that vast majority of people...
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The Miracle Program
I wrote recently about the silly contemporary myth that portrays Christianity as implacably opposed to science and progress. The legend is thoroughly disproved by an abundance of counterexamples, but some of the available correctives are so powerfully convincing that they startle, and it is odd that Christian apologists have not used them more freely against...
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Fun With Panthers
The black American fugitive who was recently caught after 41 years on the lam brought back lots of memories. No, I’ve never been a fugitive from justice, and the memories are quite pleasant, because I met all those so-called Black Liberation Army con men in Algeria just about the time George Wright flew in from...
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The Gales of November
“You’re probably not going to like this,” David Dale Johnson said, “but I’m suggesting we ask the Board of Review to reduce the assessment by $30,000.” I had retained David as a hired gun in my attempt to get our house’s assessment, and thus our property taxes, lowered. David knows a thing or two about...
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The Capitalist Nonesuch
When the first of the truly modern “modern politicians” straddled the front page, even the meliorism junkies of the New York Times deemed it proper to lament the creature’s arrival and to bemoan its lack of substance. But the journalists, as always, had no clue. In an age when money is not only paper but...
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Success(ion)
The lifeblood of Chronicles is Tom Fleming, who took the reins of an interesting magazine in 1985 and turned it into an indispensable publication for anyone concerned about the future of this country. But the magazine that you hold in your hands today also owes its current form—and perhaps even its continued existence—in no small...
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The Betsy Ross of California
Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed legislation requiring public schools to teach students about the contributions of “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.” When I was young, we were taught about men and, yes, women in California, not because of their “sexual orientation” but because they were figures of substance and significance. One of my favorites...
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Carrying the Burden
The Help Produced by Dreamworks Pictures Directed and written by Tate Taylor from Kathryn Stockett’s novel Distributed by Walt Disney Studios The Guard Produced by Reprisal Films Directed and written by John McDonagh Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics I went to see The Help fully expecting it would be a travesty of race relations...
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The Hollywood Horror
My wife does not like horror films. I used to think it was because she does not wish to be frightened, but we all, even prim Victorian ladies, enjoy a good scare from time to time, especially when we know we are safe. Girl Scouts around the campfire tell stories about the murdered little girl...
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Lessons of Libya
Liberal interventionists and their neoconservative twins on both sides of the Atlantic were jubilant as Libyan rebels took Tripoli. From now on, “The right question for the United States and its allies isn’t whether to help oppressed people fight for freedom, it’s when,” declared the Washington Post on August 24. The answer to that question...
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Wisdom and Science
Societies live by their mythologies, which become so passionately held that it’s usually risky to challenge them. Having said that, one major component of contemporary secularist mythology really has to be confronted, because it is so influential, so widely reflected in even the saner mass media, and so totally wrong. I’m referring to the familiar...
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Goodbye, Britannia
I first visited England in 1953, when I was 16 years old. It was a very different country back then, a green and pleasant place, where weekend cinemas were packed with enthusiastic movie fans all cheerfully whistling and applauding the action. The film palaces were thick with tobacco smoke, and no one left his seat...
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Running in Circles
The esteemed editor of this magazine was not at all persuaded by my discussion of Twitter in the first installment of this new column (“Weiners and Losers,” September). I would have been more than a bit disappointed if it had been otherwise. Though I have been using Twitter in various ways for over four years...
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Arabian Fall
In the U.S. mainstream media, the developments that have followed the misnamed “Arab Spring” have been curiously underreported. The reason seems clear: In recent weeks those developments have taken a clear turn away from Western-style democracy, pluralism, tolerance, respect for human rights, etc. It now seems obvious that the turmoil has undermined the region’s authoritarian...
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Under an Honorable Spell
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by David Yates Screenplay by Steve Kloves, from J.K. Rowling’s novel I took my son Liam to the first Harry Potter movie ten years ago, so I thought it only proper to let him take me to the...
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A Magical September
On September 1, 1957, a pretty French girl by the name of Patricia and an Italo-French couple, Feruccio and Ellen, joined me in the old harbor of Cannes waiting to board the super-new luxury liner Cristoforo Colombo. Our destination was Capri, and we had decided to go on the spur of the moment. Capri’s season...
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Weiners and Losers
Anthony Weiner is, in the immortal words of one Oscar-winning actress, so five minutes ago. Almost a decade and a half before the instrument of Weiner’s downfall launched on July 15, 2006, that line from one of the most perceptive films of the 1990’s presciently captured the essence of modern social media. Anyone who follows...
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Time for Disengagment
“I’ve spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower, and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position,” outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Newsweek on June 19. “[F]rankly I can’t imagine being part of a nation, part of a government . . . that’s...
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James Arness
Early in June, James Arness died. Everyone thinks of him as Matt Dillon, the brave and incorruptible town marshal of Dodge City in the television series Gunsmoke. I think of him as the father of one of my childhood friends and as one of the last actors in Hollywood to have fought in World War...