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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May 1, 2007June 21, 2022The American Interest
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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May 1, 2007June 21, 2022Perspective
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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April 1, 2007June 21, 2022In the Dark
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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April 1, 2007June 21, 2022European Diary
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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April 1, 2007June 21, 2022The Rockford Files
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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April 1, 2007June 21, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
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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April 1, 2007June 21, 2022Breaking Glass
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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April 1, 2007June 21, 2022The American Interest
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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April 1, 2007June 21, 2022Perspective
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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March 1, 2007July 26, 2022Heresies
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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March 1, 2007June 21, 2022The Bare Bodkin
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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March 1, 2007June 21, 2022In the Dark
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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March 1, 2007June 21, 2022European Diary
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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March 1, 2007June 21, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
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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March 1, 2007June 21, 2022Perspective
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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February 1, 2007June 21, 2022Perspective
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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February 1, 2007June 21, 2022Sins of Omission
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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February 1, 2007June 21, 2022In the Dark
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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February 1, 2007June 21, 2022The Rockford Files
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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February 1, 2007June 21, 2022European Diary
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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February 1, 2007June 21, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
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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February 1, 2007June 21, 2022The American Interest
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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January 1, 2007June 21, 2022Perspective
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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January 1, 2007June 21, 2022The Bare Bodkin
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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January 1, 2007June 21, 2022In the Dark
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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January 1, 2007June 21, 2022The Rockford Files
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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January 1, 2007June 21, 2022European Diary
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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January 1, 2007June 21, 2022The American Interest
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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December 1, 2006July 26, 2022Heresies
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...
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December 1, 2006June 21, 2022Perspective
Jihad’s Fifth Column
No one on the planet, by now, has not heard of the violence that greeted Pope Benedict’s references to Emperor Manuel II and his reflections on Islam. Manuel, invariably (and unfairly) described as “obscure” or “forgotten,” lived in one of those interesting ages of the world that teach lessons to those who are not blind...
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December 1, 2006June 21, 2022Sins of Omission
“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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December 1, 2006June 21, 2022In the Dark
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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December 1, 2006June 21, 2022The Rockford Files
What Lies Beneath
According to an article in the New York Times on September 10, “In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents—nearly 96,000—than in any year in the previous two decades.” Moreover, many of these are not simply Muslims who had been here on guest visas but now have been granted permanent...
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December 1, 2006June 21, 2022European Diary
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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December 1, 2006June 21, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
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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November 1, 2006June 21, 2022The American Interest
To Lose a War
President George W. Bush’s highly anticipated prime-time speech to mark the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America was supposed to be nonpartisan and conciliatory. It offered him an opportunity to present mature thoughts on one of the most momentous events in this country’s history, to correct several manifest flaws in his conceptual approach...
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November 1, 2006June 21, 2022Perspective
El Gringo y El Mexicano
America has not been a nation for well over a century. She is more like an Indian stew: Never taken off the fire, the mess of wild carrots and fish is gradually transformed by the daily addition of squirrels and squash, birds and deer, and the odd bit of human body. By the end of...
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November 1, 2006June 21, 2022The Bare Bodkin
Aaron’s Tormentors
This summer, as the odious Barry Bonds advanced toward Henry Aaron’s home-run record, I told a friend: “I’m going to write Bonds a letter. And it’s going to be even more vitriolic than the one I wrote Aaron 30 years ago.” Just kidding, of course! When Aaron broke the most venerable record in baseball—then held,...
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November 1, 2006June 21, 2022In the Dark
Of Men and Supermen
Hollywoodland Produced by Miramax Films Directed by Allen Coulter Screenplay by Paul Bernbaum Distributed by Focus Features Of the entertainment industry’s many venerable traditions, cashing in on dead celebrities ranks just below rehabilitating headliner junkies. Untold millions have been made under the guise of immortalizing fallen performers—think of James Dean, Elvis, John Lennon. And who...
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November 1, 2006June 21, 2022The Rockford Files
Life in a Border Town
The archetypical middle-sized town in the middle of the Middle West, Rockford seems about as far removed from the border as you can get, unless we count the border with Wisconsin, a few miles to the north. And yet, Rockford has been subject to successive waves of immigration that have brought with them (if in...
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November 1, 2006June 21, 2022European Diary
Of Love’s Compromises
Death is terribly tactful. It comes to a man when he finally realizes that he understands nothing, thus saving his face. Watched back to front, like the videocassette that you know is on fast rewind when you see the hooker paying the client, life is a gradual shedding of obsolescent platitudes, a quiet letting go...
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November 1, 2006June 21, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
Government by the People
Héctor Villa was, by nature, a patient, long-suffering man. Even so, he arrived home in a cross mood that evening, at the end of an unusually frustrating day. First, there had been the traffic ticket; next, his unproductive meeting with Mrs. Ahmadinejihad. Finally, he’d been unable to meet with the school principal, after waiting for...
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October 1, 2006June 21, 2022The Hundredth Meridian
Government for the People
“I owe you an apology, compadrito,” Héctor Villa was telling his friend, Jesús “Eddie” Juárez. Jesús “Eddie,” who hadn’t the foggiest idea what his friend was talking about, nodded his head and attempted a forgiving smile anyway, on the off chance it might prompt Héctor to clinch his apology by offering to buy another round....
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October 1, 2006June 21, 2022The American Interest
A Turbulent Layman
If you did not know beforehand that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadine-jad was one of the most important men in the most neuralgic region of the world—and, by extension, in the world itself—you’d never have guessed it. One of the few things he has in common with President George W. Bush is a forgettable face. In...
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October 1, 2006June 21, 2022Perspective
The Root of All Evil
When George Bernard Shaw decided to devote himself to the destruction of civilization (or, as he would have preferred to call it, the cause of socialism), he spent years studying political economy. As Chesterton put it in a book devoted to his longtime friend, Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among the...
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October 1, 2006June 21, 2022Sins of Omission
Atrocities Azteca
Nearly every celebration of Mexican heritage by Mexicans in the United States now features references to the Aztecs and some form of traditional Aztec dance, called La Danza Azteca. This would be something like the Irish celebrating Oliver Cromwell and the Cromwellian confiscations and settlement—only worse. Few Mexicans today, on either side of the border,...
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October 1, 2006June 21, 2022Breaking Glass
Historians in Blunderland
The academy is in an even worse plight than you may imagine. Every so often, surveys reveal just how far America’s professors are out of touch with the political and cultural mainstream. Not only do they overwhelmingly register with the Democratic Party, but most adhere to the straitest sect within that tradition, those who regard...
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October 1, 2006June 21, 2022In the Dark
Prohibition Addiction
Miami Vice Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Michael Mann Screenplay by Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich Miami Vice isn’t a film; it’s a cultural indicator. This thought came to me as I was making my way off a plane coming home from Las Vegas. (I was traveling for business, not pleasure, if...
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October 1, 2006June 21, 2022The Rockford Files
A Third Way
The American love of free enterprise has been one of this country’s greatest blessings. The same, however, cannot be said unequivocally of the economic individualism that we too often assume is an indispensable part of the free-enterprise system. The fundamental fallacy of that assumption should be obvious: Every economic transaction, by definition, requires more than...