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...
Category: Columns
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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...
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Out of Gas
Syriana Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan George Clooney wants you to know that he’s got gravitas. To prove it, he packed on an extra 35 pounds for his latest roles. In Good Night, and Good Luck, a film he directed, he plays Fred Friendly, the portly television producer...
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Peace in the Holy Land, Elusive as Ever
A year ago, the prospects for peace in Israel-Palestine appeared more promising than at any other time after Bill Clinton’s failed Camp David initiative in 2000. Arafat’s death in November 2004 had removed a major cause of Palestinian corruption and incoherence, as well as the justification for Israel’s refusal to accept direct talks. Mahmoud Abbas’...
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Lost in Translation
In one of his earliest essays, Walker Percy expounded a theory of “Metaphor as Mistake,” and it is true that many insights, not all of them metaphorical, can arise from misunderstanding or, as happens to me more frequently these days, mishearing what someone has said. A psychiatrist friend, back about 1970, told me of a...
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True Love Ways
For the past 40 years, Rockford’s Midtown district has seen more downs than ups. Centered on Seventh Street from First Avenue to Broadway, southeast of the main part of downtown, Midtown—once a bustling commercial and cultural center at the heart of a Swedish neighborhood—was, for far too long, a haven for prostitution and drug use. ...
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Conservatism’s Ancient Mariner
In November 2005, Bill Buckley observed his 80th birthday, and his magazine, National Review, its 50th. Both anniversaries were rather fulsomely saluted, George Will remarking that, thanks to Buckley and his magazine, the phrase “conservative intellectuals” had “ceased to be an oxymoron.” Will’s comment was apt, but in a way he didn’t intend. Oxymoron is...
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A Loyal Life
A remark I recently overheard on FOX News captured a key difference between Sir Alfred Sherman, whose assessment of the Thatcher years I now have in my hand, and those minicons who float on and off of FOX. Commenting on the visit of Prince Charles to the United States, one of the news interpreters began...
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Whose Point of Order?
Good Night, and Good Luck Produced and distributed by Warner Independent and Redbus Pictures Directed by George Clooney Screenplay by Grant Heslov With all that has been revealed since the Soviet archives were opened to scrutiny in the 1990’s, does anyone still believe that Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy was hunting witches where there was...
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Trouble With Iran
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on October 26 that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Invoking the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, he told an audience of 4,000 cheering students that a new conflict in Palestine would soon remove “this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world.” The statement, made in the midst...
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Fortifying the Backyard
“Cincinnati is no mean city,” one of my Greek professors used to say when he wanted to illustrate the use of litotes. I lived not too far north of Cincinnati for three years and spent a good deal of time in what was and is one of the few cities of the Midwest to survive...
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Foss’s Flying Circus
In the early 1960’s, I was introduced to a fellow motorcycle rider by the name of Steve Foss. Before I could say anything, he quickly offered, “No relation to Joe Foss.” He had anticipated my question and that of nearly everyone he had met for years back. For most Americans back then, the name Foss...
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A Border Surprise
In the Year of Our Lord 1878, on the sixth day of the sixth month of the year, was born to one Augustín Arango and his wife, Micaela Arambula, humble peasants on the Rancho de la Loyotada in Durango State, Republic of Mexico, a son, Doroteo, known to posterity as Francisco “Pancho” Villa: social bandit,...
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Limping to Hell With Good Intentions
A History of Violence Produced and distributed by Neil’ Line Cinema Directed bv David Cronenberg Screenplay by Josh Olson from the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke Film titles do not come more portentous than A History of Violence. Entering a Manhattan theater to view David Cronenberg’s latest cinematic lesson, I was half...
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Jihad’s Enablers
Almost 80 years ago, Julien Benda published his tirade against the intellectual corruption of his time, La Trahison des Clercs. The “scribes” in question are those who traffic in words and ideas. For generations before the 20th century, Benda wrote, members of the Western intellectual elite made sure that “humanity did evil, but honored good.”...
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The Beauty of Holiness, the Holiness of Beauty
“O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth stand in awe of him.” – Psalm 96:9 The psalmists never tired of praising the beauty and majesty of the Lord’s house. Solomon was so eager to build a fitting temple that he traded a good part of Galilee to Hiram of...
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No Mirror Image
Watching the horrible images of the recent bomb attacks in London, Americans might be forgiven for feeling a sense of alarm, especially when the terrorism was directly linked to homegrown suicide bombers. The thought of American extremists adopting similar tactics on our soil is extremely worrying, though few media outlets dared to explore the prospect...
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Redemptive Weeding
The Constant Gardener Produced by Potboiler Productions and Scion Films Directed by Fernando Meirelles, Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine from John Le Carré’s novel Distributed by Focus Features What’s in your medicine chest? Aspirin, ibuprofen, antibiotics? Let me prescribe another medicine: John Le Carré’s disturbing novel, The Constant Gardener (2001), and its recent screen adaptation directed...
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An Unsteady Empire
August 29, 2005, the day when hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, may have marked the beginning of the end of the American Empire. Four years after the horrors in New York and Washington, D.C., showed the nation’s vulnerability to external attack, the Hobbesian free-for-all in New Orleans demonstrated just how fragile it is internally....
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Revitalizing Rockford
In January, this column will celebrate its fifth anniversary. When Tom Fleming and I originally conceived of the idea back in 1998 (as an occasional “Letter From Rockford” to be written by various local activists), we were capitalizing on the fact that our city was considered by marketing agencies and national chains as an ideal...
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Agrarianism From Hesiod to Bradford
What does it mean to be an “agrarian”? In reading Southern literary journals, I get the impression that the “agrarians” were an isolated group of writers who, nostalgic for the preindustrial South, celebrated in prose and verse the bygone beauties of rustic life. In this sense, they were like the early Romantics, and their movement,...
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Christians Against Terrorism
Tony Blair is mad—really mad. Nasty people keep blowing up things in his London, and he is going to do something about it. At a press conference in late July, he told the world that he wants to make it illegal for British subjects to leave Britain for advanced terrorist training in Pakistan. The hidden...
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Two Trails to the Rainbow
It was in the spring of 1925 that a young Easterner named Clyde Kluckhohn, on sabbatical from Princeton to spend a year working on a cattle ranch near Ramah, New Mexico, first learned from a Zuñi Indian of the natural phenomenon called Nonne-zoche Not-se-lid (meaning “Rainbow of Stone”), standing at the very end of the...
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A Suppressed Embarrassment
A book that has failed to go anywhere internationally, contrary to the author’s expectation, is a recent study by a Chilean Jewish academic who teaches philosophy at the University of Berlin, Victor Farías. His work deals with the youthful thought and career of Salvador Allende, who, between 1970 and 1973, headed the Marxist Government of...
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Pimp Dreams
Hustle and Flow Produced by Crunk Pictures and New Deal Productions Directed and written by Craig Brewer Distributed by MTV Films and Paramount Classics Bulletin: Pimps and rappers have hearts; they have yearnings; they have midlife crises, for heaven’s sake! Sure, they exploit and abuse women, deal dope, and occasionally shoot one another; but, hell,...
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Intrigue in the Balkans
Having devoted a major part of my working life over the past four years to researching and writing about terrorism, I am alert to the possibility that there are a few people around me who would like to shut me up—for good, if at all possible. The tragic end of Theo van Gogh, slaughtered in...
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It Takes an Autodidact
Once upon a time, I decided to learn Japanese. I had none of the usual practical reasons: no business interests that would take me to Japan nor even an academic project comparing Noh plays with Attic tragedy. I knew next to nothing of Japan, though as a child, my imagination had been stirred by the...
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Japan’s Wars of Aggression
“Japan didn’t fight wars of aggression. Only China now says so,” declared Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of Japan’s wartime prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo, in an interview with the Japan Times in late June. Yuko was half right. Although Japan fought several wars of aggression, only China seems to raise the issue today. America dropped...
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Master of Your Domain
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear. One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...
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Preternatural Selection
War of the Worlds Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by David Koepp and Josh Friedman Holy oxymoron! Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is a thoughtful summer blockbuster. While it serves up the obligatory thrills of the school’s-out-let-it-rip subgenre, it also pays surprisingly scrupulous homage to its...
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European Disunion
In early 1980, the Soviet Union appeared to be more powerful than ever before. Its hold over Eastern Europe had been sealed in Helsinki five years previously. Its presence or influence in the Third World was rising, while that of the United States was diminishing. The notion of its eventual demise was dear to a...
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Master of Your Domain
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear. One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...
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The Republic We Betrayed
A republican government is an exercise in human optimism, and patriotic republicans must engage in an unremitting struggle against that human entropy we used to know as Original Sin. Any American citizen today can quote, or at least dimly recall, Washington’s declarative challenge in his Farewell Address: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead...
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The Wrong War
I am nervous about the course I am teaching, this coming fall, about World War II. As I will explain to the class from the outset, there are a few things I do not know about the topic—namely, when the war began, when it ended, where it happened, who were the key protagonists on each...
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Dia de los Muertos
Fall had always been Héctor Villa’s least-favorite season. This year, as the days shortened and his cousin’s stayover in his home lengthened inexorably, he felt his substance as a householder drain away in exact proportion to the diminishing quantity of the pale indirect light. Four days after the shortest day of the year comes Christmas;...
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Low Blows, Dark Vengeance
Cinderella Man Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Ron Howard Screenplay by Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman Batman Begins Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Christopher Nolan Screenplay by David S. Goyer Boxing has always been a favorite subject for screenwriters. No other sport accommodates their mythomaniacal instincts...