December can be a difficult month for American Christians, forced to look on passively as their sacred holy days are turned into a generic “holiday season.” The First Sunday in Advent has been replaced by “Black Friday,” the day on which retailers begin to turn a profit on holiday sales; and the end of the...
Category: Columns
Post
A Sad Denouement
The greatness of man, writes Pascal in his Pensees, is great so long as man is conscious of his own insignificance. “A tree, by contrast, is not conscious of its own insignificance.” In other words, man feels his insignificance; he is aware of it; and he is made great by his awareness of it. “But...
Post
The Triumph of the Secular
Having failed to establish much of a numerical presence in American society, the Episcopal Church, USA, succeeds in attracting attention by the continuing antics of a long parade of outrageous ecclesiastics. In 2003, attention focused on the ordination of openly homosexual Vicky Imogene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. While I am reluctant to add...
Post
Mr. Bush and Democracy in the Middle East
In 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini told Oriana Fallaci that Western music dulls the mind. “It involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs,” he explained; it does not exalt the spirit but puts it to sleep, and “it distracts our youth who become poisoned by it.” “Even the music of Bach, Beethoven, Verdi?” Fallaci asked. “I do...
Post
Evildoing Nations
On October 3, in an address celebrating the anniversary of German reunification, a Hessian deputy to the German Bundestag and a member of the CDU/CSU steering council, Martin Hohmann, committed a gaffe that led to his removal from his party position five weeks later. The party leader who justified this sacking, Angela Merkel, complained that...
Post
The Road to Hell
It’s been a rough three months for St. Mary’s Oratory here in Rockford. First, over Labor Day weekend, some Republican members of the Winnebago County Board, in collusion with certain Republican county officials, hatched a plan to try to include St. Mary’s in the land-acquisition area for a new, $130-million county jail. When the plan...
Post
Exhibitionists
In the Cut Produced by Pathe and Red Turtle Productions Directed by Jane Campion Screenplay by Jane Campion and Susanna Moore Distributed by Screen Gems Shattered Glass Directed by Billy Ray Screenplay by Billy Ray from an article by Buzz Bissinger Produced by Cruise-Wagner Productions Distributed by Lions Gate Films Actors are exhibitionists. They feel...
Post
The Conservative Search for Order
The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless. Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international...
Post
Seduced and Abandoned
I was reared in a cultural microcosm that undervalued experience. More than that, it treated experience as a kind of monstrous blemish upon the face of thought, a defect that was deemed the more unfortunate for being the more noteworthy, unexpected, or rare. It was as though the threadbare commonness of climbing the Himalayas, or...
Post
California’s Mythologized Bandido
On the wintry morning of February 20, 1853, more than a hundred Chinese miners were working their claims near Rich Gulch. Without warning, five mounted and gun-brandishing bandidos swept down upon the Chinese. Taken by surprise and without arms themselves, the Chinese could do little but comply when ordered to hand over their gold. An...
Post
Turning Away
By the end of last summer, it had become transparently obvious, even to the graying stallions of the “conservative movement,” that organized conservatism in the United States since the 1950’s has been a colossal failure. The failure has been clear enough to most percipient Americans for perhaps a decade or more (an essay I published...
Post
Lord Ashdown’s Balkan Fiefdom
For 200 years, the Balkan states have been manipulated by the powers of “Old Europe” to slow and control the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They were created, enlarged, and shrunk as the need arose. During the two world wars, the territories inhabited by southern Slavs were used as bargaining chips in constructing alliances, while...
Post
Always Dead Downtowns. Always.
In late October, federal agents committed blasphemy against one third of the libertarian trinity of Microsoft, McDonald’s, and Wal-Mart. In a coordinated raid on Wal-Mart headquarters and 60 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states, the feds arrest 245 illegal aliens, 235 of whom were working for a subcontractor who provided janitorial services for the chain. (The...
Post
A Dripping Spring
The parallel trails of brown smoke tracking west to east 50 or so miles ahead above the place where the Grand Canyon ought to be had a sinister aspect, suggesting another greasy invasion by the encroaching metropoli of the desert Southwest. “Is that L.A.?” I asked Tom Sheeley. “Or is it only Vegas?” Tom shook...
Post
The Human Element
Intolerable Cruelty Produced by Alphaville Films and Imagine Entertainment Written and Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Distributed by Universal Pictures Lost in Translation Produced by American Zoetrope and Elemental Films Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola Distributed by Focus Features Intolerable Cruelty should by prosecuted for intolerable smugness, the besetting sin of...
Post
Rockford and Gomorrah
American cities rot from the center like an old oak tree: Empty and desolate within, they are kept from dying only by the life that surges just beneath the surface of the peripheral bark. Here in Rockford, the flight to the suburbs is commonly blamed on the aging buildings and the unpleasantness of life in...
Post
Putting the Law in Lawrence
Though America’s academics tend to the dyspeptic and hypercritical, on one day this past year, the campus mood was extraordinarily sunny. This past June, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, declaring unconstitutional a law prohibiting homosexual conduct. In the eyes of most academics, Lawrence represented an act...
Post
Out of Korea
Another futile round of the six-nation talks on North Korea’s nuclear program ended in Beijing last September. The communist authorities in Pyongyang subsequently declared that further negotiations involving both Koreas, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States were pointless, but China said it was working to arrange a second round of talks. For once, I...
Post
Calling Bill Donohue
When cities trumpet the glories of their downtowns, they normally talk about such things as the number and variety of restaurants and stores, easy access from other parts of the city, even the availability of parking places. Here, however, we believe in “a different kind of greatness,” and I can see the ads now: “Come...
Post
Nothing Doing, Doing Nothing
Labor Day weekend honors those horny-handed men and brawny women who do the real work that gets done in America, hauling up to the pay office every two weeks in Cadillacs emblazoned with union decals to collect their fat two-week paychecks (five days’ work, another five on sick leave). A drone myself, I’m completely shameless...
Post
Quaint Honor
Thirteen Produced by Antidote Films and Michael London Productions Directed by Catherine Hardwicke Screenplay by Catherine Hardwicke and Nikki Reed Distributed by 20th Century Fox I am writing this review in my room at Hertford College in Oxford University, where I am attending the Evelyn Waugh centennial conference. Waugh studied at Hertford from 1921 to...
Post
Moon-Man Religion
American Christians love to deceive themselves. They close their eyes and pretend that the government’s war against their religion is a temporary aberration; they insist—against all the evidence—that Abraham Lincoln was a Christian; and, when some federal judge dictates a decree stripping the town square of its cross and crèche or tearing down the Ten...
Post
The GOP’s Secret Weapon
If the war with Iraq was largely the work of the Likudnik faction that has commandeered the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, the liberation of Liberia on which the President suddenly embarked the nation last summer seems to have originated at least in part with yet another lobby of questionable loyalties. On July 7, as...
Post
Reforming the Military
On August 25, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that he would look into ways to strengthen U.S. combat power without increasing the size of the military. While the “end-strength” of 1.4 million should stay the same, he intends to rebalance the active and reserve components, sending underutilized active-duty personnel to the reserves and moving...
Post
Lies and More Lies
Having come across several references this spring to a French literary critic, Jean Sévillia, who is criticizing leftist historical reconstructions, I read his two most recent books, Le Terrorisme Intellectuel (2000) and Historiquement correct: Pour en finir avec le passé unique (2003). An associate editor of Le Figaro magazine, Sévillia makes clear that he is...
Post
A Nightmare on Elm Street
I have raised up a chosen man from my people, with my holy oil I have anointed him so that my hand is always with him and my arm strengthens him. A year ago, on the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Bishop Thomas G. Doran of the diocese of Rockford elevated...
Post
A Girl of the Gilded West
Lynette Lyon Hollow liked money. Because she had never had any of her own before, though, having it around made her nervous, and so she spent it whenever she saw something she thought worth spending money on. When more money kept coming in anyway than went out, she spent faster and faster on bigger and...
Post
The Well-Holstered Gun
Open Range Screenplay by Craig Storper from a novel by Lauran Paine Produced and directed by Kevin Costner The Western film genre has often been criticized for celebrating gun violence. But mainstream oateaters often have more in common with the peace-loving Jane Austen than with the blood-besotted Sam Peckinpah. My Darling Clementine, Shane, The Fastest...
Post
The Christian Militant
“The trowel in hand and the gun rather easy in the holster” —Nehemiah, according to T.S. Eliot “Say you got two Gucci jackets, you hock one and you get yourself a gat.” —The “Bad” News Bible Jesus, contemplating His departure from this world, instructed His disciples to arm themselves, and, ever since, Christians enrolled in...
Post
Unit 731
Every time I ask my college students if they are familiar with Nazi atrocities, the collective reply is “Of course.” Nearly all of them have also heard of Dr. Josef Mengele and his horrific medical experiments conducted at Auschwitz. The “Angel of Death” has been the subject of countless lectures, articles, books, movies, and documentaries. ...
Post
The Real Cabal
After nearly two decades of paleoconservative criticism, complaints, and general grousing about the ideological hegemony of the neoconservatives, the establishment press finally began to notice the existence of the latter. Between the time of President Bush’s factually flawed “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address in 2002 and the “end” of the war with...
Post
Out of Africa
But for the death and suffering it has caused to thousands of innocents, the Liberian imbroglio would have an almost farcical quality—Graham Greene meets Lehar. On one side, there was the LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy), a ragtag army of heavily armed but poorly trained and undisciplined rebels. They nevertheless have the upper...
Post
The Perfect Storm
The chain saw screams as it hits the wood, then slides through the first few branches as if they were butter. I toss them aside, and Jacob and Stephen each grab hold of one, dragging it, struggling, over to the gate and out onto the driveway. It has been two weeks since the storm, but...
Post
Homecoming
I’d worked in the oil patch for several weeks already when I bought a T-shirt at the J.C. Penney Mother Store in Kemmerer. The shirt was fire-engine red with black lettering across the chest. The letters said, “IF YOU HAVE ONLY SIX MONTHS TO LIVE MOVE TO KEMMERER WYOMING. IT’LL SEEM LIKE A LIFETIME.” Since...
Post
They’re Back
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Jonathan Mostow Screenplay by John Brancato, Michael Ferris, and Tedi Sarafian The Hulk Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Ang Lee Screenplay by John Turman, Michael France, and James Schamus Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black...
Post
Back to Reality
The modern age has been a 500-year revolution against Aristotle. Bacon and Galileo assailed his authority in the natural sciences; neoplatonists rejected his metaphysics in favor of a false mysticism that was little better than black magic; Epicureans, thrilled with the insights of the rediscovered poem of Lucretius, preferred hedonism and materialism to Aristotle’s morality...
Post
How Erewhon Ended Ethnic Profiling
Let me apologize. A massive technical glitch, involving distortions of the fourth dimension, has prevented me from researching the column I intended to write about ethnic and racial profiling. The column would have pointed out that many people who complain about profiling fail to define just what the term means. They confuse blatant examples of...
Post
The Great Crackpot Crackdown
Within a few days of the American conquest of Iraq, it was obvious that the Bush administration’s “War on Terrorism” was a monumental flop that has probably endangered the United States and Americans abroad far more than it has protected them. Not only were American soldiers being slowly picked off by snipers inside Iraq but...
Post
Exiting Iraq
It is sometimes necessary for a great power to keep a distant small country under military occupation—if need be, for a very long time. The Romans could not contemplate an “exit strategy” from Palestine in the first century A.D.—or from a few other hotspots around the empire’s outer perimeter—without compromising their status as the world’s...
Post
WWMD?
I want to speak to you today about war and empire. Killing, or at least the worst of it, is over in Iraq. Although blood will continue to spill—theirs and ours—be prepared for this. For we are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as...
Post
Waugh on Film
The High Green Wall (1954) Adapted for The General Electric Theater Columbia Broadcasting System Directed by Nicholas Ray Teleplay by Charles Jackson In 1929, Evelyn Waugh wrote that film was “the one vital art of the century,” an accolade he would later qualify. While he came to believe that cinema had “taught [novelists] a new...
Post
Loyal Opposition
In the two years since Muslim terrorists murdered over 3,000 of our citizens on September 11, Americans have been taking one side or the other in the debate between the partisans of security and public order, led by Attorney General John Ash-croft, and the partisans of free speech, championed by the ACLU and other groups...
Post
It Was the Worst of Times
The French Revolution was a cancer that metastasized and spread through Western societies, weakening them to the point of collapse. Even the European and American right did not escape being contaminated by the forces they struggled against, and, certainly, by the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly difficult to frame a conservative argument...
Post
The Old Right Failure
No sooner had at least a dozen or so counterattacks on David Frum’s silly rant against paleoconservatives in the April 7 issue of National Review appeared in print or on the internet than the sole defense of the Frum article of which I am aware popped up under the name of William Rusher. Some paleos...
Post
Le Monde, the Flesh, and the Devil
A livre à scandale in France this year is a heavily documented work by two veteran freelancers, writer-researcher Pierre Péan and Philippe Cohen, editor of the French satirical publication Marianne. La face cachée du Monde, which runs over 600 pages, was put out by the very independent press Mille et Une Nuit, over threats of...
Post
Fragile Empire
There have been strong empires with weak currencies, but not often and not for long. The Soviet Union, Spain after Philip II, the Ottoman Empire after Suleiman, and an impoverished Britain after Versailles all come to mind. That financially fragile states cannot support ambitious political and military ventures is obvious to common sense and confirmed...
Post
Two Deserts
Nineteen ninety-one was Operation Desert Storm. In 2003, it is Operation Shock and Awe—or was it Awe and Terror, or Shlock and Glock? We make progress backward, as befits the new millennium. Twelve years ago, the Pentagon at least managed to get the desert into it. The Mesopotamian Desert, as the troops have discovered on...
Post
Giving the Devil His Due
Early in the morning factory whistle blows, Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes, Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light, It’s the working, the working, just the working life . . . One of the oddest ironies of our postindustrial age is that conservatives—true conservatives, not the various utopian...
Post
God’s in His Heaven
The Matrix Reloaded Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski Bruce Almighty Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Tom Shadyac Screenplay by Steve Koren and Mark O’Keefe The Matrix Reloaded, the second film of a projected trilogy, could hardly be more disappointing. Four years ago, The...
Post
Imitation of Life
“You shall have life and that abundantly.” What did Jesus’ followers make of this bold promise? He had shown them that he could cure the diseases that afflict both body and mind, and, in bringing Lazarus back from the dead, He lifted the veil to reveal a part of the mystery of His own being. ...