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...
Category: Columns
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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A Mainstream Conservative
In a sane world, Dinesh D’Souza would not merit a single inch of this column. The greater Middle East, Islamic terrorism, Korea, the Balkans, the imperial mind-set, and many other problems and challenges America faces around the world would take precedence over the musings of a self-designated “conservative intellectual” with few original ideas and little...
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Our Fathers’ Fields
Conservatives in the 21st century lead subterranean lives, taking refuge in their obscurity and finding comfort only in the virtual memories of better times, memories all too often implanted from misleading books and films. Like aristocratic pagans in the afterglow of the Roman Empire, they are a despised minority who fight symbolic battles. In 382,...
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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...
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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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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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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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The Great Unrest
Bro. Billy Joe had been correct, Héctor reflected bitterly: Abdul Agha and the Crusade for Souls were a nationwide story all right, though everyone tried to pretend it was nothing more than a curious local phenomenon. From the start, the New Mexico media had sought the appropriate tone in reference to a “certain unrest” in...
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The Next Militia Panic
Only a fool would try to foretell the course of U.S. politics a few months in advance, let alone several years in the future. The fact that Democrats are riding high after their electoral triumph last November does not necessarily mean that they will win the White House in 2008. But just suppose that January...
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A Tale of Two Cabals
Imagine yourself at a fashionable party, a century ago, in Belgravia, the Upper East Side, or the Ballplatz. After-dinner brandy is served, Augustas are lit, and the talk turns to world affairs. The host asks his guests what they deem to be the issue that threatens peace and stability more than any other. A senior...
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Dead Monkeys and the Living God
Sir Elton John would like to “ban religion completely” because it stirs up “hatred toward gay people.” Like so many giants of the entertainment industry, Elton John probably does not hate religion per se but only Christianity. Christophobia is the religion of Hollywood. Ask Barbra Streisand; ask the top brass at Disney or DreamWorks. The...
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Immanentizing the Eschaton
Around this time every year, I find myself in the strange circumstance of writing a column before Ash Wednesday that won’t appear until after Easter Sunday. If the overarching theme of my column were something other than Rockford as a microcosm of America, this situation might not seem so odd. Every year, however, I’m haunted...
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Café Society
On the pavement flank of the café, my field of vision was being traversed, with the quiescent regularity of Attic horsemen galloping along the circumference of a drinking vessel, by strange women. Making their way up the Fulham Road, past the famous cinema, some of them moved in little groupings, like schools of gamboling goldfish;...
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The Squirm Index
Little Miss Sunshine Produced by Big Beach Films Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris Screenplay by Michael Arndt Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Little Children Produced and distributed by New Line Cinema Directed by Todd Field Screenplay by Tom Perrotta and Todd Field Allow me to introduce the Squirm Index. For a while now,...
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Jihad on the Rio
On a morning less than a week before the kickoff to Bro. Billy Joe’s Crusade for Souls, AveMaría, after she’d dropped Contracepción off at the mosque, was in the middle of a U-turn in the street when a car rounded the corner ahead on two wheels, heading directly for the Subaru. As there was nothing...
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Daughter and Lover
For days after the meeting with Bro. Billy Joe, Héctor was too angry to communicate with his wife other than in monosyllables. During most of this period, the reason for his anger eluded him. It was not until the third or fourth day that he understood the cause of his distress. Whether the kid Abdul...
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If Pigs Could Fly
The day after Christmas 2006, the U.S.-military death toll in Iraq overtook and then surpassed the total number of Americans killed on September 11, 2001. Some Democrats, even before the symbolic number was reached, were calling for a withdrawal, either immediate or gradual, of U.S. forces. President Bush, although he had abandoned his signature tune...
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A Threat to Our Very Way of Life
Here’s a heresy for you. A grave danger is lurking among us, caused by certain people who are spreading lies—and in the name of Christianity! So grave is this danger that it threatens our very way of life. And, as one of our great leaders once said, “The American way of life is not negotiable.”...
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Hitchcock Without Stars
Alfred Hitchcock now enjoys a high and even, some would say, an exaggerated reputation among Hollywood film directors. Certainly, he is among the most influential, if only because with Psycho (1960) he created the mother, as it were, of all slasher movies. One reviewer, wishing to hint at the film’s theme without revealing the ending,...
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A Political Honeymoon
I had fallen in love with Italy because she was my twin, my mirror image, my other half. Like me, she wanted to sit between two chairs, to have her torta della nonna and eat it, too. She sought to arrest the dissolution of society by progressive, that is to say capitalist, fictions; yet she...
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Astray From the Fold
The Good Shepherd Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Robert De Niro Screenplay by Eric Roth Call me slow, but I had to see The Good Shepherd twice to figure out what was going on. Truth to tell, I’m still not entirely sure what this dour, 167-minute CIA drama wants to say. Its...
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Blood Offerings
Casino Royale Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis Distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment Apocalypto Produced by Icon Productions and Touchstone Directed by Mel Gibson Screenplay by Mel Gibson and Farhad Safinia Distributed by Buena Vista Pictures Unlike the earlier techno-laden James Bond films, Casino Royale...
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Mother and Daughter
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Villa slept much that night from worry over Contracepción and her love interest. From time to time, one or the other would drift off—AveMaría into nightmares of a Muslim wedding, Héctor to dream of thrashing the lusty young Islamist within an inch of his life. But they would soon wake and...
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Clint Eastwood and Moral Equivalency
Since at least the late 60’s, there has been an effort in academe and in Hollywood to make all cultures morally equivalent. More recently, there has been an effort to make “indigenous cultures”—whatever that means—morally superior to Western civilization. I was thinking of all this when I read an interview with Clint Eastwood that appeared...
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The Grass Is Not Greener
The outcome of last November’s mid-term elections reminded us for the umpteenth time that democracy in America is a corrupt “democratic process” controlled by an elite class that conspires to make secondary issues important and to treat important issues as either irrelevant or illegitimate. One party may be in; another, out; but the regime is...
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Pigs Is Pigs
Politics is like the weather: No matter how blue in the face we talk ourselves, no matter how many virgins we sacrifice to Odin, our leaders do not improve, and the drought continues. The fates who determine the destinies of nations are no more obedient to our words than the little gods of wind and...
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Blue Christmas
The November election results were all about the war, the chattering classes told us; and in this case, there’s probably more truth to popular opinion than not. For those of us who have opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning (and even before), this seems a rather strange moment. After all, what really changed...
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The Art of Misanthropy
Photography is a mongrel art, half applied, half found. But then the world we live in is a mongrel world, a hybrid that fuses extant custom and tradition—including, for instance, the constitutional principle of limited government—with the emergent totalitarianism which, as Huxley noted in his Preface to Brave New World, would always assume innovative and...
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Cross-Cultural Follies
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan Produced by Everyman Pictures Directed by Larry Charles Screenplay by Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, and Dan Mazer Distributed by 20th Century Fox Babel Produced by Anonymous Content and Zeta Film Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu Screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga Distributed...
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Iraq: The Least Bad Scenario
The Democrats’ victory on November 7 and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s departure a day later marked the beginning of the end game in Iraq. The moment is reminiscent of December 1970, when President Nixon decided to pull U.S. forces out of Vietnam by the end of the following year. The major difference is that...
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Two Oinks for Democracy
In the year 2000, many conservatives, with or without holding their noses, turned out to vote for George W. Bush. One of the Republicans’ strongest selling points during the campaign was Governor Bush’s oft-repeated declaration that his administration would not engage in nation-building experiments. After eight years of President Clinton’s busybodying in the Balkans, where...
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Are the Good Times Really Over?
In mid-September, the original campus of Rockford’s Barber-Colman Company was named an historic district and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a fitting end to one of Rockford’s best-known manufacturing sites. Founded in 1900, the Barber-Colman Company gradually built the 15-building plant between Rock and River Streets, by the very ford in...
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On Being “Right Wing”
As I write these words, just after the November 7 elections, liberal Democrats are enjoying a well-earned gloat on their victory over the right wing. Just one question: What does right wing mean? I’ve puzzled over this question for years. I’ve also posed it to liberals, who can’t really answer it. They apply this term,...
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Déjà Vu by the Gross
Off the back of the little three-wheel ladybug-shiny truck in front of the house, parked under an exuberant tree to which one of the neighbors had attached a washing line, early this morning I bought two yellow melons, three kilos of Muscat grapes, two kilos of late, hillside peaches, a kilo each of plums and...
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Eyeless in Love
The desire to spit is widely underrated as a motive. Yet it was known throughout the university I attended, for instance, that the founder of Pan American Airways, one of its illustrious and discontented alumni, had built the PanAm skyscraper over Grand Central Station in New York with the single-minded purpose of being able to...
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American Parenthood
Overwhelmed by the shame of having a juvenile delinquent for a daughter, Héctor could almost forget that he himself was a convicted criminal and the subject of an investigation by the Immigration and Borders division of the Department of Homeland Security. The entire business had been a father’s worst nightmare, as well as a major...
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Infernally Yours
The Departed Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Martin Scorsese Screenplay by William Monahan In The Departed, a raucously sordid meditation on the ways of the lower-class Boston Irish, director Martin Scorsese has included a passing tribute to Carol Reed’s peerless film, The Third Man. Reed’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s novella concludes with...
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“Scratch One Flattop”
It was America’s first naval battle of World War II, Japan’s first loss at sea in the war, the battle that saved Australia from a Japanese invasion, the greatest naval battle in Australian waters, the first carrier battle, and the first battle in which the opposing fleets never came within sight of each other or...
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Solemn Joy and Hot Gospel
’Twas the middle of that sacred time of year when all Americans pause to remember what is most important—Christmas Shopping Season. I had just walked through the automatic doorway of MediaPlay, out in what was then the edge of Rockford’s wasteland (the East State Street shopping corridor, which has since sprawled itself all the way...