Stop-Loss Produced by Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions, and MTV Films Directed by Kimberly Peirce Screenplay by Kimberly Peirce and Mark Richard Distributed by Paramount Pictures On March 29, 2008, Suffolk County police officers vigorously fulfilled their sworn duty at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, New York. Alerted by the mall’s security...
Category: Columns
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If My Daddy Could See Me Now
September 11, 2001, we are often told, “changed everything.” In Washington, D.C., and Baghdad, Iraq, that may have been true. President George W. Bush and a handful of his advisors, who had been itching for a fight with Iraq since before the inauguration, now saw their opening. It would take another year and a half...
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Speaking of Gorging
A few weeks ago, I attended a most wonderful party, with music, pretty girls, lots of champagne—and even some people who did not move their lips while reading the labels of the expensive bubbly and Scotch whiskey they were imbibing. Namely, Tom Wolfe, Lewis Lapham, Graydon Carter, Edward Jay Epstein, and other such New York swells....
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The Pursuit of Happiness
“This used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.” When people of a certain age and experience begin to think about when and how America went wrong, they almost inevitably hear echoes of George Hanson’s little sermon, delivered by Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. An ACLU...
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For Better and For Worse
That Christmas was, in every respect, the horror Héctor had feared it would be. Homesick, broke, unchurched (AveMaría, after the second round-trip drive to the Assemblies of God church in Lordsburg, had decided to hold a Sunday prayer service at home instead), cooped together like rats in a cage, the Villas, with the Juárezes, endured...
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Lieutenant Ramsey’s War
Ed Ramsey never aspired to be a hero. He was only 12 years old when his father committed suicide. He was a natural-born hell-raiser; bootleg whiskey and fighting were his passions. His mother thought the Oklahoma Military Academy might salvage him. He loved horses and all things martial. The academy had both. Ramsey thrived at...
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The Rhetoric of Fashion
“For his birthday his wife gave him a riding crop that cost 100 francs,” a writer called Arnold Ruge complained of his newly married friend, a fellow German émigré in Paris, and the poor fool does not ride, nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to have, a carriage, smart clothes, a...
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The Postmodern Sneer
Funny Games Produced by Celluloid Dreams Directed and written by Michael Haneke Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures After seeing Austrian director Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, I experienced an unaccustomed urge. I wanted to buy a .45. I’m sure this was not the reaction Haneke was hoping for, but he can hardly complain. After all,...
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Tan, Rested, and Ready
“I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.” The inauguration of the first black president of the United States on January...
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City of Light, Summer of Hate
It was the merry month of May, 40 years ago. I had been living in Paris for a decade, had just moved into a beautiful farmhouse ten miles west of the city, had recently become a bachelor again at age 31, and had given up competitive tennis for polo and the Bagatelle polo club. My...
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Beastie Boys
After the recent shootings on the campus of Northern Illinois University, network-news programs were filled with helpful proposals for dealing with the growing problem of school violence. The suggestions were the predictably inane and irrelevant products of post-Christianity’s impoverished imagination: more counseling for shocked and grieving students, a university warning system complete with a database...
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Smokers in the Arsenal
Several years after he was forced into retirement, Otto von Bismarck was asked what could start the next major war. “Europe today is a powder keg,” he replied, “and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal . . . I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you...
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The Country of the Blind
In the 1960’s and 70’s, when European countries were admitting large migrant populations from predominantly Muslim regions, Western governments had a powerful vested interest in encouraging the growth of politicized Islam of the straitest sect. European political attitudes were shaped absolutely by the Cold War confrontation, and the Middle East featured chiefly as a theater...
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Lobar Warming
Scoffers may deride the proposition I find instinctively plausible, that the consonants and the vowels of speech are its masculine and feminine constituents, though the same scoffers would not think to keep a professor from speaking of male rhymes or an electrician of female plugs. Yet the role of women in many societies, historically considered,...
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Shaming
Knocked Up Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by Judd Apatow Juno Produced and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Produced by Mobra Films Directed and written by Cristian Mungiu Distributed by IFC Films Thirty-five years ago,...
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The Vanishing Middle (America)
The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer, the politicians and pundits tell us every evening on the news. Lost in the rhetoric is any concern for members of the middle class, who are in danger of becoming nothing more than a footnote in future histories of the United States. If England...
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Dealing With the Devil
I do not normally take pronouncements from show-business folk seriously—they are almost always publicity ploys—but in the Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg case against Beijing’s “Genocide Olympics,” I will gladly make an exception. We all know that there is something rotten at the heart of modern sport, starting with the Olympics, which was, once upon...
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Little Aristocracies of Our Own
How beastly the bourgeois is, Especially the male of the species D.H. Lawrence’s lines are still quoted, though most often by writers who know nothing else of his poetry. It is taken for granted that Lawrence was right to contemn the “middle-class values” of the whited sepulchers who pretend to virtues and tastes they do...
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In the Looking Glass
The holidays were fast approaching, and, for the first time in his life, Héctor could find no joy in the prospect of the Christmas season. Homesick, guilt-ridden, pinched in his wallet by his irregular business schedule, and worn down by the rigors of patrol with the Critter Company, he felt physically and mentally exhausted. The...
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Kosovo Crisis Becomes Global
The unilateral declaration of independence by the Albanian leadership in Kosovo on February 17, and the subsequent recognition of the new entity by the United States and most E.U. countries, crowned a decade and a half of iniquitous U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia. By recognizing “Kosova,” the White House has made a great leap...
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Payback for Pearl Harbor
I was recently visiting with an old Marine Corps buddy, Ralph Willis, at his home on California’s central coast. At 86, he is one of the fortunate few who are still alive to describe their experiences fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. Ralph put down some of his memories in My...
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National Religion
Americans are a people of deeply held religious conviction. If any has doubts, let him look on the most serious of our sacred holidays and believe. Naturally, it is a federal holiday, but that fact alone does not convey the magnitude of this special day. For, unlike other federal holidays, this one carries with it...
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Memoirs of a Bridegroom
If the typical life of a young couple resembles an Oriental bazaar, where the clamoring for jewels, perfumes, spices, silks, and other aphrodisiac appurtenances of fata morgana breaks on the morose tightfistedness of those who can afford them, in my case the reverse was true, not only because I could afford nothing, but because my...
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Marxist Obsessions
There Will Be Blood Produced and distributed by Miramax Films Directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson Many American film reviewers must labor under the spell of Marxist sentimentality. It’s as though they have never recovered from their undergraduate viewing of Battleship Potemkin (1925), Sergei Eisenstein’s clever but facile Soviet-propaganda film. Not surprisingly, whenever left-wing...
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The Future of Tyranny
My mother, an incurable Democrat, God forgive her, adored Adlai Stevenson. To her mind, he and Richard Nixon offered the extreme and opposite poles of spiritual reality, like Saint Michael and Lucifer. Among today’s politicians, Sen. Barack Obama inspires the same rare kind of devotion. I am not suggesting that this passion is warranted; on...
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Three Coins
The weather in Rome has been on the chilly side, but compared with Rockford in January, it’s positively balmy. Warm enough, in fact, to risk a charge of heresy (or at least philistinism) by capping the first full day of The Rockford Institute’s 2008 Winter School with, not a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, but a...
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Scuppering the Serbs
I live in New York and London, and among the gruesome sights I’ve had to endure these last few years has been the sight of a vainglorious James Rubin, of Madeleine Albright fame, prancing about the hot spots of these multicultural havens for the rich and infamous. Rubin is married to Christiane Amanpour, the...
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Our Open (Borders) Secret
The long campaign of 2007-08, already sputtering out in fizzled squibs, childish ploys, and pointless personal recriminations, has offered few of the moments of drama or high comedy that Americans have rightly come to expect of our political candidates. The debates have been as drab as Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits, as wooden as Barack Obama’s imitation...
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Cupid’s Thunderbolt
In the weeks immediately following the encounter with the illegal immigrants in the arroyo, Jesús “Eddie” and Héctor were men possessed by a single idea, though not the same one. Jesús could think only of joining up with the recently formed Critter Company, based in El Paso but with a chapter in Deming, and fighting...
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Waiting for the Big One
The global economy is like the St. Andreas Fault. You know that a terminal disaster is inevitable, but you keep your fingers crossed and try not to think about it. When a tremor occurs, you often fear it could be the Big One and sometimes panic, but then, when the dust settles, you sigh with...
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Total Accuracy
I was married once. Twice, actually. No, just the once, really, because the union had been annulled before I married again for the second or, rather, the first time, on the legal grounds of mutual and substantial misunderstanding. In reality, just then I had met the woman who would become my second or nearly first...
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Who’s That Angel of Death?
No Country for Old Men Produced and distributed by Miramax Films Directed and written by Joel and Ethan Coen It’s not often that an audience gasps at the end of a movie and shouts, “What?” or “You’ve got to be kidding” at the screen. But that’s just what several people did in the theater in...
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The Words of Muhammad (PBUH)
When confronted with an American convert to Islam who has studied overseas, it’s hard not to think today of the celebrated case of John Walker Lindh, “the American Taliban” captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and brought back to the United States to stand trial. “Abdul” knows that, yet he’s chosen to be brutally honest...
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Taking the Mickey
In an English court of law 21 years ago, I had the opportunity to discover firsthand how touchy judges can be when challenged from the dock. It was a case of libel that caught both the tabloid and broadsheet imagination, not to mention the BBC’s. I had referred to a very rich old woman as...
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The Suicide of the West
The issue of Kosovo, which has been simmering since the United States waged a war of unprovoked and unjustifiable aggression against the former Yugoslavia, is boiling over. While Serbian “public opinion” is said to be more interested in economic questions, the resentment against the international community is real. As one senior advisor to Prime Minister...
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So Goes Old Europe
Last December 10, after four months of futile shuttle diplomacy, the mediating effort by the U.N. Contact Group “troika” to reach an agreement on the final status for Kosovo predictably collapsed. “Neither party was able to cede its position on the fundamental question of sovereignty,” the U.S.-E.U.-Russian group reported to the U.N. Secretary General. The...
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Cartoon Enlightenment
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...
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A Remembered Kindness
Lebanese restaurants in London used to position their shawarma near the front window, so that a passerby could always tell the time of day by the volume of the orotund mass of diced lamb remaining on the spit. Now that many of them have become gentrified, that traditional enticement has been replaced with potted palms...
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Excellent Enemies
Lions for Lambs Produced and distributed by United Artists Directed by Robert Redford Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan Bulletin: The neocon pundits are going to war! Not to Iraq or Afghanistan, though. No, they’re landing in our local movie theaters and pounding away at all those treasonous antiwar movies being thrust on the unsuspecting public....
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Jesus’ Simple Message
When you get intimately familiar with any artist’s work, you become delightedly aware of the development of his style. I was reminded of this lately while working on a book about Shakespeare; more than ever, I was impressed by the vast difference between the “middle” Shakespearean style and the later style (or styles). The pithy...
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You Read It Here First
A little less than a year ago, in the February 2007 issue, I introduced in these pages the story of Derrick Shareef, an African-American convert to mainstream Islam who was arrested on December 8, 2006, for plotting an attack on the largest shopping mall in the Rockford area during the height of the Christmas shopping...
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Saudi Bums
As I wrote five years ago in another place, beginning a new column is like the first date with a girl you’ve had your eye on for a long time but never had the courage to ask out. One’s nervous. But this is a new year, 2008, and let’s start it off right by telling...
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The Politics of Human Interests
After wearing out the patience of television viewers over an entire year of premature campaigning, the two political parties will soon be informing us of their choices. Will the presidential election of 2008 really come down to a contest between two leftist anti-Christian senators representing New York? Or will Al Gore, even more bloated with...
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The Empire: Not So Great in ’08
Iraq will continue to top the list of American foreign-policy concerns in 2008. While tactical successes in Baghdad and the Anbar Province were achieved in 2007 through the U.S. forces’ marriage of convenience with various Sunni Arab tribal leaders and former Saddam loyalists who detest Al Qaeda even more than they dislike the Americans, translating...
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Freedom of Conscience
The Illinois legislature recently overrode Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto of what the newspapers are describing as mandatory-school-prayer legislation. Predictably, the state’s editorial pages are filled with denunciations of this arbitrary attempt to impose religion on the helpless children of Illinois, but in fact, the new law, requiring a minute of silence at the beginning of...
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A New Balance of Power
Seven years is a well-rounded time span, for better (“Behold, there come seven years of great plenty”) or for worse (“And there shall arise after them seven years of famine”). As we enter the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency, it is time to look at his septennial foreign-policy scorecard without malice, which his...
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A Pair of Charmers
There are two archetypes of the charming idler. One, rather like myself, is likely to be unemployed de métier. The other drifts in and out of employment, trading on social connections, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, pandering, dealing cocaine, walking dogs, selling Impressionist pictures, joining the Foreign Legion, working on a perpetuum mobile, discovering...
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Slinging It
In the Valley of Elah Produced by Blackfriars Bridge Films and Summit Entertainment Written and directed by Paul Haggis Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures Michael Clayton Produced by Castle Rock Entertainment and Section 8 Written and directed by Tony Gilroy Distributed by Warner Brothers There are two kinds of symbolism: the gilded and the golden. ...
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Inside the Gates
Fr. Brian A.T. Bovee, the rector of Saint Mary’s Oratory in Rockford, sometimes calls his church Santa Maria Inter Carceres—Saint Mary’s Among the Jails. It’s a (half-)joking reference to the oratory’s location just to the west of the Public Safety Building, just to the east of the new Winnebago County Jail, and just to the...
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A Close Encounter With the Enemy
Following his conversation with Jacinta Ruiz, Héctor took down from its shelf the statue of the Centaur that had been gathering a coat of the fine yellow dust blown in from the Chihuahuan Desert through chinks in the ranch-house walls and put it away in the closet, and he did not visit the Pink House...