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...
Category: Columns
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Defending the Normal
Conservatism is usually defined as “opposition to change,” “adherence to the old and traditional,” and so forth. But, of course, in the Bush-Cheney era, we all feel these familiar tags to be seriously inadequate, even wholly beside the point and downright misleading. If these men are conservatives, as the news media insist on calling them,...
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In Contention
3:10 to Yuma Produced by Tree Line Films Directed by James Mangold Screenplay by Michael Brandt and Halsted Welles Distributed by Lionsgate The Nanny Diaries Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company Directed and written by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini 3:10 to Yuma began as a 15-page Elmore Leonard short story, as bare...
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A Sense of Perspective
It may seem to the least demanding of readers that this column, though generously meandering of thought, is short of action. The trouble, I must admit, is that I have no sense of perspective. There may well be more references to current events in a couple of pages of Plato’s Dialogues than in everything I...
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In the Garden
“How’s your garden doing this year?” It’s a familiar question, as normal as the greeting that began the conversation and the goodbye that will end it. I cannot start a conversation with my grandmother, or an aunt or uncle or cousin, without being asked the question within a minute or two—or, depending on the time...
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Staying the Course
Those of us who grew up under communism remember well the ritual of the Leader’s Speech. At a Party congress—invariably dubbed “historic” even before it began—or on the occasion of the opening of a new steel mill, the Dear Comrade would deliver a much-heralded oration. It usually contained three main ingredients: “We” are making great...
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Wiccan Warming
The summer of 2007 was nearly intolerable here in Northern Illinois. Except for a glorious week in July when the sun, shining bright in the clear sky, never warmed our city to above 80 degrees, the days were an unpleasant mix of heat and humidity, punctuated by a few cool stretches drowned in torrential rains...
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Henny Penny
No End in Sight Produced by Representational Pictures Directed and written by Charles Ferguson Distributed by Magnolia Pictures The Bourne Ultimatum Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Paul Greengrass Screenplay by Tony Gilroy and Scott Z. Burns The Simpsons Movie Produced and distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Directed by David Silverman...
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The Fig Leaf
All one can ever imagine of Eve is the fig leaf, but the whole issue is more universal, and at the same time somehow more prickly, than any isolated contretemps in the Legoland of the senses. Say “glutton,” and in your mind’s eye you’ll see a mutton joint being brandished by some Rabelaisian hand; say...
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The New Math: 66 < 60
How much would you pay for a library card? In Rockford, if you are not a resident, you have to pay $140 per year for the privilege of using the Rockford Public Library system. With six branches scattered throughout the city and over 400,000 volumes, most avid readers who aren’t relying on the library for...
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Submarine Ace of Aces
Now that the youngest of our World War II veterans, with but a few exceptions, are in their 80’s, I fear that, as they die, memory of them will die also. While teaching history in college for more than 30 years—15 of those at UCLA, where a single class could have more than 400 students—I...
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Villa Blanco, Villa Negro
Revealed in the headlights of the van, Las Palomas had never looked so depressing to Héctor as it did that night. Indeed, it appeared to him as positively sinister, a ghost town in which the few flesh-and-blood inhabitants were the apparitions, and the thronging specters from the past, the true living beings. It occurred to...
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A Divided Subcontinent
A 31-gun salute boomed at daybreak on August 14 in Islamabad to mark Pakistan’s 60th anniversary of independence from British rule—or, to be precise, her birth as a Muslim state that resulted from the bloody partition of India in 1947. That event was accompanied by the largest mass migration in history, as over ten million...
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“Make Me Do Right or Make Me Do Wrong, I’m Your Puppet”
Nicholas Chiaroscuro is one of the most important men in American politics. Not that he is a politician. Mr. Chiaroscuro does not aspire to the lofty position of political puppets whose only qualifications are an insipid face, a case of hair spray, and an infinite capacity for self-gratification. Chiaroscuro looks upon such creatures much as...
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Egypt’s Momentous Event
Every American knows that Egypt is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, by far the most populous Arab Muslim state. Many Americans, on consideration, might also be aware that, before the arrival of Islam, Egypt was just as solidly Christian, the cultural and spiritual heart of the early Church. How did one situation give way to the...
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The Atheist’s Redemption
In my last appearance in this space, I wrote erroneously that Christopher Hitchens had favored both Anglo-American wars on Iraq. In fact, he strongly opposed the first one, back in 1991. I remember this so vividly (I was delighted with him at the time) that I can’t understand how I could be so embarrassingly forgetful...
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I Love My Mother
Sicko Produced by The Weinstein Company Directed and written by Michael Moore Michael Moore calls his films documentaries, but they’re really sockumentaries. He is cinema’s heavyweight master of the sucker punch. Behind his slovenly, shambling flabbiness, he packs a vicious left hook. That’s politically left, of course. Now, some suckers deserve to be pounded by...
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Promises, Promises
The world of pulp and prevarication, whose deluged plateau the young woman I was in love with had fled, called to mind a private letter of Pasternak’s written in the 1920’s. There the poet described the icy slush of totalitarianism, emulsifying every existing object out of recognition, as the epochal substratum in which his kind...
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Trusting Whitey
On June 30, 2002, the Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit came to an end. After 13 years of busing; the closing of numerous neighborhood schools, one of which is now a mosque and Islamic school; the construction of several massive (and massively overpriced) magnet schools, including a Spanish-language-immersion school and an environmental-science academy; white and middle-class flight...
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Héctor Agonistes
For more than a week after his encounter with Jacinta Ruiz, Héctor avoided the Pink Store, finding an excuse to drive Jesús “Eddie” to Geronimo’s Bar & Grill in Deming—which Jesús much preferred anyway—instead. All this time, the Centaur’s statue stood on the top shelf of his computer hutch, where he had to make the...
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The President’s Painted Corner
A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered...
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Counting People and People Who Count
My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education. It was all time wasted, less profitable than time wasted on politics. Politicians, to their credit, know that it...
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Evangelical Theologian
Harold O.J. Brown fell asleep, as Our Lord puts it, on July 8, just two days after his 74th birthday. This magazine’s religion editor since 1989, he was a contributor before that. The title of this column was inspired by his most significant book, among several significant books, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the...
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Jekyll and Hyde in a Box
Mr. Brooks Produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Directed by Bruce A. Evans Screenplay by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon Last month, the Wall Street Journal gleefully doted on billionaire wonderboy Stephen Schwarzman of the aptly named Blackstone Group, a firm dealing in private equities and leveraged buyouts. Schwarzman, George W. Bush’s roommate at...
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An Idle Character
The riddle of Svengali is only a riddle because men, in particular, tend to caricature their position as the breadwinning yang with respect to the theatrical female yin, supposing that what lies on the far side of the sexual divide is love, while what lies to this side of it is money. But the idea...
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A Light Out of the Dim
How did an eighth-generation German-American growing up in Rockford, Illinois, proud of his ethnic heritage, baptized Lutheran, educated in Catholic schools, come to convert to Islam? As Aaron, “Abdul,” and I sit down at the Richard John Neuhaus Memorial Conference Table, that question hangs in the air. “I came from a broken family, basically,” Abdul...
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White Sprinters
For several years now, professional baseball has been pouring millions of dollars into developing black players. Evidently, the number of black players, at least American blacks, has been in decline. NASCAR is funding programs to develop black drivers after fielding complaints that the sport is too white. Similarly, the NHL now has a “Diversity Program”...
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Mexico Way
Though Héctor had lived all his life in a desert climate, he was a town kid whose closest experience of the desert itself had been to drive across it at 50 or 60 miles per hour. Now that he was actually living there, he found the reality of the experience daunting, even frightening. For Héctor,...
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Conservative Russia, Imperial America
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to yield to Western pressure and accept Kosovo’s independence at the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm has prompted a new round of Russia-bashing at both ends of the political spectrum. Editorial columns were filled with references to Putin’s “posturing,” “bluff,” “intimidation,” and “empty rhetoric.” His “hard line” may “reignite ethnic violence,”...
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Connoisseur of Chaos
In a spurt of avuncular generosity, I handed the young man a cigar. It was a pretty good smoke, maybe a Romeo y Julieta or a Maria Mancini I had bought for half-price. (I buy all my cigars on sale or do not buy them at all.) The polite young man thanked me, clipped the...
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The Atheist Renaissance
Atheists are feeling their oats these days. Three militant unbelievers—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—have recently hit the best-seller lists and talk shows. Not since Bertrand Russell have we seen atheism so prosperously married to celebrity. Why now? Since the September 11 terror attacks, militant Islam has given ammunition to those in the secularized...
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In the Register of Ka-ching!
The Hoax Produced and distributed by Miramax Films Directed by Lasse Hallstrom Screenplay by William Wheeler With The Hoax, Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom and his screenwriter, William Wheeler, have at long last given Clifford Irving his due. They have done so by portraying their subject with about as much honesty as Irving did Howard Hughes...
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Kierkegaard and the Camera
On a balmy spring day, a visitor to St. Mark’s in Venice, if he is adventurous enough to make his way to the top of the cathedral and look down, will see the subjacent piazza covered in a species of vermin. Excoriating the global tourist is almost as banal a pastime as trailing through an...
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A Highly Personal History
We’re about 50 miles east of Toledo, cruising along the Ohio Turnpike on our way to Cleveland for the wedding of longtime Chronicles contributor Tom Piatak. Satisfied from a lunch of cabbage rolls, paprikas dumplings, and Hungarian sausage at the original Tony Packo’s, I have Amy’s MacBook open on my lap and Bruce Springsteen’s Born...
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On Tolstoy and Fiction
Andrei Navrozov’s dispatches from Europe are always interesting and well written, but in “Love and Fiction” (European Diary, May), he makes a comment that could use clarification. According to Navrozov, Leo Tolstoy is not a writer like Orwell and Dostoyevsky, who drew upon personal experience to invest their work with vividness and verisimilitude. Orwell had...
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Witness Un-Protection Program
Abdul Kahn’s face had remained entirely expressionless throughout the forty-five minutes required to get the wireless router that connected the three computers in the house back up and running, yet Héctor felt as certain that he had been recognized by the other man as he was in making his own identification. He’d experienced an excruciating...
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Balkan Blowback
On May 1, at a hearing on the future of Kosovo, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democrat Tom Lantos of California, made a truly remarkable statement: Just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led governments in this world that here is yet another example that the United States leads the way for the...
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Ted’s Timor Mortis
It was the second night of RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults), and Ted, the amateur catechist in charge of the class, was on a roll. The students were an odd lot of fallen-away Catholics, disgruntled Protestants who wanted to become Catholics, and men and women engaged to Catholics who objected to mixed marriages. ...
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The Sea Gave Up the Dead
“Lord, he looks so peaceful,” Miss Alice said tearfully. I braced myself for a long two hours at my post—and that was before the funeral started. Interrupting my thoughts, she looked up at me and spoke in a whisper that was loud enough for Pastor Brown, who was standing on the other side of the...
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The Genetics of Hate and Mercy
The Wind That Shakes the Barley Produced by UK Film Council Directed by Ken Loach Screenplay by Paul Laverty Distributed by IFC First Take Last month, scientists at Oxford University reported that there are no significant genetic differences between the British and the Irish. Their announcement might almost have been timed as a sardonic backdrop to...
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Lana Turner’s Nose
In the spiritual suburbia whose probable attitudes to various emotional predicaments I imagine in these diaries, men tend to pride themselves on their rationalism and are much less interested in the alchemy of feeling than women, as shown by audience-share breakdowns of soap operas and by the proportion of romantic subject-matter in women’s magazines. “Love,”...
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Sex Slaves
By the 1950’s, professors at our universities were teaching American history, “warts and all.” By the late 60’s, it was mostly warts. Now, it is all warts, all the time. The Japanese have taken a different tack. They have sanitized their history, especially their actions during World War II, and only in response to pressure...
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Just an American Boy
Give me, ya-Allah, Give me Iman and victory. Give me, ya-Allah, give me strength to set us free, As we struggle on your path, Mujahideen Five years ago, Aaron Wolf and I first heard these lines being sung by Muslim children as young as six years old when we spent a day at the Muslim...
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A Close Encounter With the Enemy
In the early hours of the following morning, well after closing time, the Taberna Aztlán exploded in flames and burned to its concrete foundation in ninety minutes. Héctor learned of the disaster shortly before 6 A.M. when AveMaría shook her husband awake to give him the appalling news. (Since the attack on the machine shed...
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The Revolt of Islam
In 1899, Winston Churchill expressed his concern about the “militant and proselytizing faith” of Islam. “Were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science,” he said, “the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.” His contemporary, Lord...
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Establishing Christian America
We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth. In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim. Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not...
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Was George Will Wrong?
If Rush Limbaugh can pass for a conservative these days, it’s no marvel that George Will can, too. Unlike Limbaugh, he at least reads books, especially Victorian ones. (He even named his daughter Victoria.) But he shares with Limbaugh an easygoing approach to defining conservatism, to the extent that a tabloid tramp such as Rudy...
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The Personal Is Not the Political
The Lives of Others Produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk and Creado Film Directed and written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Breach Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Billy Ray Screenplay by Adam Mazer and William Rotko Anyone who wants to know what it is like to live in a...
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Love and Fiction
I said I had fallen conditionally in love, and now anyone apart from myself would have paused to wonder what on earth, if anything, this awkward phrase could possibly mean. “Great! A penniless foreigner, a writer courting failure, a serial adulterer running off with an American teenager! He has a condition to make, would you...
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When You’re Alone, You’re Alone
Three months ago, in the American Proscenium (“By Their Fruits,” February), I posed a question: “Is a lone wolf any less a wolf because he is alone?” My musings were prompted by the arrest, on December 8, of the Rockford jihadi Derrick Shareef (a.k.a. Talib Abu Salam Ibn), a black convert to the “religion of...