Coincidence is the smile of luck, but it is also the laughter of misfortune. A smile is singular, rather like tears; it appears meaningful insofar as it seems to have a precipitant cause. Laughter, by contrast, is repetitive and mechanical; automatons may laugh, but they can scarcely be imagined smiling. Thus, hysterical laughter is common...
Category: Columns
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An Undesirable Independence
Given the wars and rumors of war from North Korea to the Middle East, the last thing America needs is to reignite the proverbial powder keg in the Balkans, a region that has been fairly stable for the better part of this decade, especially when compared to the bloody 1990’s. That precarious stability could be...
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For Zion’s Sake
“For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace,” declares the LORD, through his prophet Isaiah, “and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.” So great is God’s provision for His people that even “the Gentiles shall see...
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Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
Faculty parties are excruciating experiences—bad food and worse conversation. It has been many decades since American professors were scholars or scientists who could take an intelligent interest in a wide range of subjects, but they doggedly persist in repeating the opinions they have picked up like so much lint. Younger professors are perhaps the worst...
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Holmes & Sons
During a recent bout of infirmity, I turned for solace to the greatest storyteller of modern times, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). If this sounds like excessive praise, I ask you—no, I defy you—to name his superior, or even his nearest rival, for that title. Late in the Victorian era, Conan Doyle, a struggling physician,...
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Super Savior
Superman Returns Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by Bryan Singer Screenplay by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris The American Civil Liberties Union’s executive officers must be on vacation somewhere off the telecommunications grid. This supposition occurred to me as I watched Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns. Although the film takes off the wraps...
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Shades of Blue
The Rockford Public Schools, as longtime readers of Chronicles know, have seen more than their fair share of troubles. With the end, in June 2002, of the 13-year-long desegregation suit and its accompanying rule by the federal courts, and the hiring of Dennis Thompson as superintendent in 2004, however, the school board has begun to...
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Sex and Poverty
The poor smelled, and there was nothing to be done about it. “Middle-class people believe that the working class are dirty,” George Orwell recalled, “and, what is worse, that they are somehow inherently dirty.” His childhood nightmare was having to drink from a vessel touched by the lips of a presumed social inferior. I had...
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Leonardo’s Little Joke
The Da Vinci Code Produced by Columbia Pictures Directed by Ron Howard Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman from the novel by Dan Brown Distributed by Sony Pictures At one point in The Da Vinci Code, the marvelously funny movie based on Dan Brown’s as nearly hilarious novel, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), renowned cryptologist for the Direction...
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Black Like Me
Rockford alderman Ann Thompson owns a cleaning service. That, in itself, is not surprising; while Rockford aldermen receive some benefits that are traditionally reserved to full-time employees (such as health insurance), they are paid a part-time stipend, and only those who are retired or independently wealthy could afford not to have another job. For months...
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A Position of Poverty
It is all very well, strolling arm in arm through the hothouse of gloriously midsummer fiction, snatching a vermouth and bitters in the shadow by Fouquet’s, hailing a taxi some gilded moments later; it is all very well when you have the money to get yourself to Paris, to pay for the perfumed drinks, to...
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Noche de Desastre
The morning after meeting Juanito Villalobos, Héctor, throwing Dr. Spock’s strictures to the wind, put his foot down when Dubya demanded to be taken to the Lion Habitat immediately after the family’s return from breakfast at McDonald’s. His patience was suddenly at an end. Although the Habitat itself was free, the Villas’ suite by now...
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A Serious Third Party?
The looming amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants is deeply unpopular with millions of Americans, and for good reason: If the immigration bill the Senate passed in June gets through the House, this nation is finished. The bill would not only legalize some ten million illegal aliens but bring in five times that many—legally—over the...
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Socialism Is Theft
The troubles of youth have long been a staple of popular fiction. In 19th-century fiction, wellborn young men borrowed against their future inheritance in order to pay for the wine, women, and song that red-blooded young men have always pursued. In the mid-20th century, readers were titillated by tales of urban ethnic kids—Irish, Jewish, black—whose...
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Guadalcanal: An Emotion, Not a Name
In most history textbooks today, coverage of the war in the Pacific consists of a summary of the Battle of Midway, a brief mention of leapfrogging islands, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Battle of Midway is almost invariably described as the “turning point” in the Pacific campaign that put the Japanese...
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Nobody’s Going to Help Us
United 93 Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by Paul Greengrass United 93 is the extraordinarily convincing faux-documentary of what might have happened aboard the fourth plane hijacked on September 11, 2001. Flight 93 was the one that may have been headed for the Capitol in Washington, D.C., until its passengers stood...
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Not Fade Away
At first glance, the area around Anthony Rudis’s 614-acre farm outside Monee, Illinois, seems closer to my hometown in Michigan than it does to Chronicles’ hometown of Rockford, Illinois. (As the crow flies, the distance between Monee and Spring Lake is almost the same as the distance between Monee and Rockford.) Having traveled the 290/294...
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A Desert Idyll
For Héctor, Las Vegas was the American city. The Strip at night suggested, Héctor thought, an explosion in a fireworks factory—all the flashing, soaring, running, bursting lights in every color of the universe; the gaudy hotels, like upended cruise ships; the fancy stores, luxurious casinos, and romantic cocktail lounges; his compatriots crowding everywhere and jabbering...
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Church Shopper
Like the French, we Americans live in, to borrow from Claude Polin, a “me-first” society. Each and every man is the measure of all things, his own arbiter of that which is beautiful, true, and of good report. Reared on the Disney principle (You can be whatever you want to be, or, Be true to...
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One Hell for All
In Sartre’s grim play No Exit, a man and two women are in Hell, which, in this case, is a brightly lit drawing room furnished in the style of deuxième empire. At one point, the man, Garcin, famously quips that “hell is other people” (“l’enfer, c’est les autres”). One of the women, Inès, eventually responds...
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Violent Revolution
This past spring, while Congress was engaging in its usual mock debate about tightening immigration, hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans took their case to the streets. In the first round of demonstrations, Chicanos, waving Mexican flags, demanded rights for illegals and declared that all those who favored enforcing the law were racists. We all heard...
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The Big Word
What is culture, anyway? It’s one of those baffling words that at first seem to mean a narrow range of things (stuff such as “grand opera”) and then turn out to cover just about everything—even the New York Post, if you stretch it far enough. As with art and history, you may find yourself using...
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The Saint of the Sourdoughs
More than 20 years ago, I presented a paper on the Old West at an historical conference and was surprised to find that I upset several female professors in the audience. I had not disparaged their frontier sisters. Quite the opposite: I described how strong, courageous, enterprising, and successful were many of those pioneer women. ...
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By Any Means Necessary
Was there a point at which American liberals consciously adopted Jacobinism, or did it just creep up on them gradually? This question was brought into rather sharp focus earlier this year when the PBS series American Experience presented an expensive two-part documentary entitled “Reconstruction: The Second Civil War.” The series recounted the story of Reconstruction,...
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Word Power
V for Vendetta Produced and distributed by Warner Bros. Directed by James McTeigue Screenplay by Andy and Larry Wachowski Thank You for Smoking Produced by Room Nine Entertainment and ContentFilm Written and directed by Jason Reitman from the novel by Chistopher Buckley Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures “Words will always retain their power.” So says...
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A Few Bad Men
The results of two extensive studies were released too late for me to consider them in my column (“Truth and Consequences”) last month. Both the “Report on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and the 2006 Supplementary Report to...
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Everybody Loves Paul
These are the days of shame for American Christians. Not the sort of shame, like Isaiah’s, that results from coming face to face with a holy God. (“Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips.”) Instead, it is the sort that Buck Dorkman feels in the school cafeteria, when he picks up...
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Neglected New Martyrs
Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who faced the death penalty in his native country for converting from Islam to Christianity, was granted political asylum in Italy and arrived in Rome on March 29. His release came after several weeks of intense pressure by the United States and other Western governments on Kabul to spare his life...
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Imposing Utopia
George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency on a pledge not to engage in the nation-building experiments that characterized the Clinton years, and, like every other president of the 20th century, he did not simply break his major promises: He did exactly the opposite. Naturally, his administration has plenty of excuses. Failing to discover those...
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The Way We Were
I am not by nature, I think, a grumpy old man. But, at the age of 60, I feel entitled to comment on some inescapable facts about the younger generation. If my judgments seem harsh, I can only invite the reader to try to refute them, if he can. Or if she can. (Equality requires...
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Crash Course
Crash Produced by Bull’s Eye Entertainment Directed by Paul Haggis Screenplay by Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco Distributed by Lions Gate Films Last month, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its 78th annual awards ceremony. Dreamt up by Louis B. Mayer in 1927, the Academy’s advertised mission was to confer legitimacy on...
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Truth and Consequences
Next month will mark the fourth anniversary of the adoption, by the U.S. Catholic bishops, of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. The protocol document was the bishops’ response to allegations of long-standing clerical sexual abuse of minors over the past 50 years. While the media, victims’ advocates, and not a...
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The Candidate
A politician’s life—Héctor was discovering—is, like that of any celebrity, not a happy one. Even before he’d announced his candidacy for the open seat in New Mexico’s First Congressional District, Tomasina Luna issued a campaign statement announcing her endorsement by the National Council of La Raza, accusing the Republican Party of racism (amounting possibly to...
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A Balkan Tragedy
For the past two-and-a-half millennia, our civilization has cultivated tragedy as an art form that articulates some of the key problems of our existence. Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III—these works speak timeless truths in an ever-contemporary language. In the case of Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milosevic, reality has proved equal to inspired imagination. His life, which...
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New Wine in Old Bottles
Suppose a wife is dying or has been lying for years in a coma: Who has ultimate authority to decide what medical treatments will be used to prolong or not to prolong her life? Suppose a child of divorced parents is taken out of the country by his mother, who then dies, leaving the child...
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Black Sheep One
“Thou shalt not honor a white man,” says the first commandment of the politically correct—unless, of course, the white man in question is hastening the destruction of Western civilization or, perhaps, preserving the habitat of the pupfish. A recent example of dishonoring an American hero occurred at the University of Washington, when a student senator,...
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The End of Childhood
If you want to see how America’s liberal elites would like to reshape the United States, look at Western Europe. For decades, they have dreamed of importing European social models, of a Swedish welfare society, and of comprehensive sexual tolerance à la Hollandaise. But the liberal vision is most perfectly manifested in the form of...
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Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Brokeback Mountain Produced and distributed by Focus Features Directed by Ang LeeScreenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from a story by Annie Proulx An enlightened colleague recently asked me what I thought of director Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain. When I told him I thought it a dreary, sappy soap opera, he smiled pityingly...
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Home, Sweet Home
The Rockford Institute sits on the northern edge of Rockford’s downtown, at the upper end of a stretch of North Main Street that local boosters have dubbed “the Cultural Corridor.” The corridor is not much even by the standards of modern cities—a few museums, the Coronado Theatre, the New American Theater, the Rockford Woman’s Club,...
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Mending Wall
The Jewish population I encountered during my recent month-long tour of Israel was markedly different from anything I had expected. If there are Israeli counterparts to Abe Foxman and Midge Decter, I didn’t meet them. The vast majority of Jews I did meet were Moroccan and Levantine, while most of the security police in the...
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Muslim Rage and American Folly
The U.S. State Department has effectively sided with militant Islam by condemning the decision of newspapers in Denmark, Norway, and elsewhere in Europe to publish cartoon drawings depicting Muhammad, the founder of Islam. On February 3, State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus told reporters, “Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable....
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The Bush Legacy
Does anyone really remember what sort of president Bill Clinton was? Have we all forgotten his amazingly sordid character so soon? He disgraced the Oval Office like no president before him; he was only the second to be impeached; he embarrassed America before the world; known as Slick Willie in his native Arkansas, he almost...
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Where the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers Meet . . .
Some 45 years ago, I was sitting in Washington Park, a quiet refuge in downtown Charleston defined by Broad, Meeting, and Chalmers Streets. The park was my favorite place to read and to engage in what was then every young man’s hobby: brooding about girls. Sitting there, I be- came aware of an annoying presence—...
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The Draftee
Héctor Villa did not feel disposed to take phone calls this morning. He was at work outdoors, gilding a large piece of driftwood he and Jesús “Eddie” Juárez had retrieved from a sandbar in the Rio Grande between Contreras and the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge and brought home in Jesús “Eddie”’s pickup truck for display...
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Keeping the Promise
Munich Produced and distributed by DreamWorks and Universal Pictures Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Eric Roth and Tony Kushner Munich is Steven Spielberg’s account of Israel’s retaliation against the Palestinians who masterminded the kidnapping and murder of 11 of their athletes during the 1972 Olympics. He has brought all the enormous resources of his...
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Farewell to Spare Oom
Just before the December 7, 2005, premiere of Walt Disney Pictures’ The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, a tiny bomb was dropped on Christians in America and Great Britain who were desperate to see the film. Val Stevenson posted the text of a brief letter on her literary website, Nthposition.com,...
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Profiling and Spying: A Necessary Evil
Gary S. Becker, a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a 1992 Nobel Prize winner, cannot be accused of “racism.” After all, he supports liberalizing immigration laws for educated professionals from around the world, especially India and China. But his warning, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last December, that...
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The Royal Prerogative
The Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London has disclosed one of America’s dirtiest secrets: In this country founded, so we are told repeatedly, on the liberal trinity of rights to life, liberty, and property, our claims to property are as tenuous as the liberty of Christian parents with children in public...
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Zebra Killings
Whenever whites commit crimes against blacks, the dastardly deeds make headlines and are featured on nightly news programs. The president wrings his hands and makes speeches about racism. The Promise Keepers hug one another, cry, and confess to a newly minted transgression, the “sin of racism.” Western Europeans look down their long noses at us. ...
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The Book of Judith
As 2005 drew to a close, the scandal over the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame potentially threatened to overwhelm leading figures in the Bush White House. Meanwhile, editors and journalists have been struggling to keep a straight face while affecting shock at the central revelation of the case—namely, that major news stories commonly derive...