“The true meaning of Christmas gets lost when we believe contrary worldviews,” the prisoner writes. “Our beliefs determine our views in a world where absolutes are fading away.” The prisoner is dictating this for his newsletter. Come-to-Jesus (or -Allah) experiences abound in prisons, so it’s always wise to take conversion stories with a grain of...
Category: Columns
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Going Through the Motions
I did not expect to like the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, which is why I had never bothered to go up to Montmartre. The basilica was commissioned by Catholics who had survived the Paris Commune of 1870-71, when churches were destroyed and the faithful were persecuted. Even as the revolution was sputtering out, the communists...
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Heisenberg’s Curious Principle
A Serious Man Produced by Studio Canal and Working Title Films Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen Distributed by Focus Features Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is hardly cinematic, yet Ethan and Joel Coen have made it a linchpin in the plots of two of their films, The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)...
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An Arresting Moment
Five years ago, I wrote of the horror that Aaron Wolf and I experienced as we spent a morning photographing the old Turner School here in Rockford. Built in 1898, the massive brick-and-stone structure was closed 80 years later by a school board attempting in vain to avoid a lawsuit over busing. Today, little effort...
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The Limits of Compassion
Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business. No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy—not to mention that Mitterand pedophile—I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on...
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Something to Remember
Francis Parkman concluded his monumental account of France and England in North America with the Peace of Paris of 1763, by which France ceded Quebec, once and for all, to the British Empire. In an uncharacteristically smug observation on the aftermath, Parkman described the French Canadians as “a people bereft of every vestige of civil...
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Crazy Russian No More
A quarter of a century ago, when I started writing for this magazine, I was the Russian. Along with the sense of exclusivity it afforded, that simple tag gave its owner a clear run through the 1980’s and 90’s on both sides of the Atlantic. I was the only Russian in any crowd, whether as...
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Once There Was a War
“Sut mae? Sut rydych chi?” I’m going to assume that most readers did not understand those phrases, which translate roughly to “How are you? How are things going?” And that lack of comprehension is a critical historical fact, because, if a generation of British historians and archaeologists is correct, then you should have no problem...
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Cupidity
The Informant! Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Steven Soderbergh Screenplay by Scott Z. Burns based on Kurt Eichenwald’s book “Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas,” Chaucer’s pardoner warned his guilt-ridden audiences: The root of all evil is greed. Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! serves as a latter-day illustration of this admonition. In The...
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The Flying Tigers
The first “paper & stick” model airplane I ever made was a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. I painted it in the color scheme of the famed Flying Tigers, including the shark’s mouth on the cowl and air scoop. Mine was powered not by a 1040 horsepower V-12 Allison but by a rubber band that I wound...
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A Cautionary Tale
When pro-life activist James Pouillon was murdered in Owosso, Michigan, on September 11, I read a few dozen accounts from both national and Michigan news sources and quickly decided I had a handle on the story. Harlan Drake, the man who has admitted to murdering Pouillon, seems deeply disturbed, and he had murdered another man...
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Breakfast With Bin Laden
I sat down to write this column in the Big Bagel, as I call New York City, and it was to be about the latest hagiography of Winston Churchill, a man I not only dislike but consider to be a war criminal par excellence. Then I heard the sirens outside my house and was deafened...
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Remembering Who We Were
We were in Athens, near the end of July, having dinner with some Greek friends at Attikos, a popular rooftop restaurant with a view of the Parthenon. Like most conservatives, our friends are somewhat pessimistic about what the future holds for their country, and from their description it seems to me that as the left...
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The Salami Fallacy
A few months ago in this space I described the Pecorino Effect, referring not so much to the Italian cheese as to the shopper’s inability to refuse any merchandise he has sampled, irrespective of what he thinks of the quality. I diagnosed this modern malady, with myself as a specimen of social tissue in the...
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Aliens and Knaves
District 9 Produced by Key Creatives and WingNut Films Directed and written by Neill Blomkamp Distributed by Sony Pictures Forty-five years ago, radio humorist Jean Shepherd wondered why filmmakers invariably portrayed alien invaders as intellectually light years ahead of human beings. Wasn’t it possible, he mused, that extraterrestrials might be a tad slow on...
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Coming Home
“The people who go to St. Stan’s aren’t Polish; they’re Polish-American.” Those words, blurted without thinking, have haunted me for almost a decade and a half. Anna Mycek-Wodecki, then art director of Chronicles, was a true Pole. Like Leopold Tyrmand, the founder of Chronicles, she was a refugee from communism. Unlike Tyrmand, she was ethnically...
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Oiling Up the Wheels of Justice
He is the clown prince in a continent whose rulers boast of more clowns among them than all the circuses of the world combined. He uses more black shoe polish on his hair than a company of Rumanian hussars use on their thigh-high boots, and plasters more makeup on his face than Norma Desmond. He...
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Christian No More
C.S. Lewis wrote about the “death of words.” In essence, he suggested that, whenever we feel compelled to append a noun with the adjectives true or real, it is safe to say that the noun has lost its meaning, or died. “No, no, we’re true conservatives.” There’s my example. So what do you do, then? ...
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Stepping Backward
When Jefferson Davis was a boy, he told his father that he did not wish to go to school. The Yankee schoolmaster, although a kindly man, demanded a great deal of memory work and threatened to punish young Jeff for his failure. His father took the declaration in stride and calmly explained to his son,...
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The Brazilian Cow
In the middle of the 19th century, Sydney Dobell wrote a poem that contained the following line: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” This excursion into the absurd c. 1850 is readily recognized by readers of American poems or novels c. 1950 as a cry of the soul in torment. The...
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Reporting and Deciding
The Hurt Locker Produced by First Light Production and Kingsgate Films Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Screenplay by Mark Boal Distributed by Summit Entertainment At last we have a movie that makes us feel the full obscenity of the Iraq war. Other films have been well intentioned but have either given in to the temptation...
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The Noble Savage
A sequel to Dances With Wolves is reportedly scheduled for release in 2011. Not only did Dances create a romantic American Indian who never existed, it reversed the roles of the Sioux and the Pawnee. This kind of thing has been going on for hundreds of years, beginning with various European writers who, far removed...
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Manufacturing Our Future
Last month, I discussed what the future of manufacturing in the United States will have to be, if manufacturing in the United States is to have a future; this month, I can say with some certainty that I have seen the future of manufacturing, and it is here in Rockford. Before you laugh and turn...
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Of Gentlemen Sportsmen
By the time you read this the U.S. Open will be in full cry. Tough, unsmiling professionals will be hitting balls back and forth with machine-like regularity, and Cyclops, the mechanical eye that overrides human decisions, will be resolving close matches. It is Aldous Huxley come true, with a little Orwell thrown in for good...
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Johnny Rocco’s World
Conservative political strategists are like the military strategists they would like to emulate: They are always fighting the last war. For how many years, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, did conservatives continue to rail against the communist menace? Marxism, and not only the virulent Leninist strain adopted by the Bolsheviks, had once posed a...
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Looking Backwards
Hard cases make bad law, and since 2002 the exposure of some ugly criminal cases has stirred legislators in several states to contemplate dreadful legal innovations. However far removed these crimes may appear from regular mainstream American life, the legal principles involved threaten to wreak havoc in the coming decades. As all the world knows,...
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What a Drag
Drag Me to Hell Produced by Buckaroo Entertainment Directed by Sam Raimi Screenplay by Sam and Ivan Raimi Distributed by Universal Pictures Some reviewers have hailed Drag Me to Hell as an hilariously ghoulish comedy. I can’t think why. Oddly enough, it takes calculating discipline to make a comedy genuinely hilarious, and that is...
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The End of Manufacturing
The unemployment rate in Illinois broke double-digits in May to hit a seasonally adjusted 10.1 percent, a 26-year high. Of course, double-digit unemployment rates are nothing new here in Rockford; we have been above ten percent for the better part (so to speak) of a year now, hitting a high of 13.5 percent in March...
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Laugh Riot
If you think comedy is dead, just read Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest proposals regarding a Palestinian state and try to keep a straight face. “Let us begin peace negotiations immediately without preconditions,” says the comedian, and then proceeds to state the following preconditions: Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank, where Palestinians hope to build a...
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Breast Implants and Barbarians
When Miss California’s assets were revealed to be fakies, I immediately thought of a line from Roland Bainton’s excellent and concise history The Medieval Church: “The real point,” he wrote, “was . . . ” Well, first, the story. Way back on April 19, during the Miss USA pageant, California’s Carrie Prejean was flying high. ...
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The Good Life
“Say, I guess America is just about the best country that has ever existed in the history of mankind.” I have been hearing this assertion all my life and never fully understood what is intended, unless it is merely one of those ahems that we Americans inject into a conversation when we have nothing to...
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Geez
Angels & Demons Produced by Columbia Pictures Directed by Ron Howard Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp from the novel by Dan Brown Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing For those who care, I’ve given away the ending of Angels & Demons in the review that follows. Those irrepressible schlockmeisters Ron Howard and Akiva...
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki
I recently saw a video clip of a television talk-show host calling President Truman a war criminal for authorizing the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have heard others make similar comments. During the late 1960’s it became almost de rigueur on college campuses for professors to argue that the bombs were unnecessary, that...
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Of Sycophants and Soliloquies
For those of us here in Rockford, Illinois, 200 miles (give or take) northwest of South Bend, Indiana, President Barack Obama’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame on May 17 provoked a sense of déjà vu. For it was on that same date six years ago that another commencement address on a controversial...
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Boozing With Papa
Fifty-four years ago this month, dizzy with happiness at having been freed from the jail that was boarding school, I ventured down New York’s 5th Avenue looking for fun and adventure. I knew a place called El Borracho, Spanish for “the drunkard,” where my parents used to dine. The owner was an agreeable Catalan who...
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Immigration, Neighbors, and Enemies
It is like a science-fiction movie from the 1950’s. Mysterious radiation from outer space takes over the brains of Asian men in America, turning them into moral zombies that go on killing sprees: a Buddhist in Texas who tried to beat the demons out of his three-year-old son who had eaten meat; a discharged IBM...
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The End of the Chain
The global decline of fertility rates may well be the single most important trend in the contemporary world, a phenomenon that will transform our societies into something radically different from anything in recent history. The worldwide birth strike will cause upheaval in the ethnic and social structure of familiar nations and will echo through financial...
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Pretenders
Revolutionary Road Produced and distributed by Dreamworks and BBC Films Directed by Sam Mendes Screenplay by Justin Haythe from Richard Yates’ novel The Lemon Tree Produced by Eran Riklis Productions and Heimatfilm Directed by Eran Riklis Screenplay by Suha Arraf Distributed by IFC Films British director Sam Mendes has turned Richard Yates’ 1961 novel,...
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Deal With the Devil
For several months after last November, the American media raved about Barack Obama’s achievement in becoming the first African-American president of the United States. I didn’t—and couldn’t—join in the jubilation, for several reasons. First, it had always seemed to me obvious that we would have a black president someday. When I was in junior-high school...
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All Local, All the Time
One of the talk-radio stations here in Rockford bills itself as “All Local. All Day.” It is an interesting slogan, in light of increasing reports of the impending failure of local media; it would be even more interesting if it (or a version of it) were not used by hundreds of other talk-radio stations across...
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Up From Knavery
I recently attended a jujitsu tournament in Newark, New Jersey, a 15-minute train ride from New York City. I had been to the Newark airport before but never entered the town. It was quite a revelation. I walked up the main thoroughfare, named after Martin Luther King, Jr., and saw only black people. The solitary...
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Free Men of a Republic
“The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.” I first heard this wise insight into the American way of life from Sam Ervin, who was, as I have since learned, quoting John Ciardi. I should not be surprised: Poets always get to the heart of the matter a...
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The Blind Ape
In the 1970’s, one hardly ever heard the word atheist. One had the impression that the impassive majority never considered the subject long enough to have made the term a part of their active vocabulary; while the typical exception would proffer, with an upraised finger and a coy smirk, something along the lines of “let’s...
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Return to Rome
Paul Theroux laments that the world is aging badly, that the world he knew as a young man has nearly vanished, that the decline and decay of precious things is everywhere apparent. Theroux should know; he travels more than I do. Also my own ventures at home and abroad depressingly confirm his impressions. Except when...
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The Ponderous and the Fleet
Watchmen Produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures Directed by Zack Snyder Screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse Duplicity Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by Tony Gilroy The title of Alan Moore’s 1986 comic-book series Watchmen alludes to the Roman satirist Juvenal, who asked, “Who watches the...
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Mr. Outside: Glenn Davis
As the 20th century drew to a close lists of the century’s greatest figures in various fields of endeavor appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines. Revealing that memories were short, the lists tended to be dominated by figures of recent vintage, especially in the sports world. This is probably a consequence of the ephemeral nature...
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Now He Knows the Rest of the Story
“Hello, Americans. This is Paul Harvey. Stand by for . . . news!” His voice was arguably the most recognized in the history of radio. His broadcasting career lasted over three quarters of a century, from his days as a high-school intern at KVOO in his native Tulsa, Oklahoma, until 2009. Yet few of the...
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Europe’s P.C. Fatwa
Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember that Europe was the cradle of democracy. For today Europe seems to be sliding inexorably into a culture of control that would have made Stalin proud. Carol Thatcher, the daughter of the great Lady T, was recently banned from the BBC for referring to an unnamed tennis...
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A Pearl and Some Swine
It’s Lent, so naturally I’m thinking about Barack Obama. Well, specifically, about his inauguration. You remember, don’t you—the day that hope became sight? I don’t want to be overdramatic, but it now seems obvious to me that President Obama’s inauguration explains just about everything that’s wrong with Christian churches in America. And really, this has...
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Dead Romans and Live Americans
“Libero Ingresso” says the little sign on the doors of an Italian shop. English speakers who know enough Italian to translate the words, Free Entrance, sometimes wonder if there was a time when Italian shopkeepers charged customers an admission fee, to be refunded, perhaps, if a purchase was made. It is just the sort of...