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...
Category: Columns
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...
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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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Of Chance and Memory
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...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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...