The meadow sweeping from the treeline down to the lake below had turned yellow almost overnight, with purple patches of the frost-seared ground cover showing through. The lake surface was no longer a smooth reflection of the stony peaks, standing against the cold sky and dusted now with new snow, but an infinite series of...
Category: Columns
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The Jihadist Fifth Column: The Cure
Contrary to numerous optimistic assurances from high places, three years after September 11, the reach and operational capability of Islamic terror cells remain strong. They are present in areas previously closed to the recruiters of future “martyrs”—notably in Iraq—and in countries where, only a decade ago, they did not have a significant presence (e.g., Indonesia). ...
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Nostalgia’s Rearview Mirror
The Motorcycle Diaries Produced by South Fork Pictures Directed by Walter Salles Screenplay based on The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara and Traveling with Che Guevara by Alberto Granado Distributed by Focus Features Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Produced by Brooklyn Films Written and directed by Kerry Conran Distributed by Paramount Pictures It...
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Red Over Black
For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, the Indians of North America practiced slavery. Until the 18th century, those enslaved, for the most part, were other Indians. The tribes of the Pacific Northwest, for example, raided constantly, principally to secure slaves. The populations of some villages were one-third slave. There is even an instance of a...
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Becoming Native to This Place
This fall has been especially beautiful here in Rockford. There is some truth, however, in the old adage that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” so I am not certain whether a year’s worth of rain and sun and cold nights with a moderately late first frost have all come together to provide...
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Where’s Joe McCarthy When You Need Him?
Many Americans are so disappointed with the Bush administration that they are tempted to vote for John Kerry. Some Democrats who spent the past 80 years waiting for the Revolution to blow over may think theirs is still the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” as it was dubbed in 1884, but, by the 1960’s,...
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The People’s Militia
The U.S. Capitol may be the most easily parodied symbol of America. It is a gift to cartoonists, who can use the dome to symbolize graft, foolishness, hot air, scandal, self-seeking—everything, in fact, that can go wrong with a democratically elected legislature. In the past few years, though, all that has changed utterly, and not,...
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After Beslan: Change Course on Russia
It is hardly possible to envisage an orgy of terrorist savagery more depraved than that staged by Chechen jihadists and their foreign cohorts, who butchered, tortured, and raped hundreds of Russian children in the town of Beslan last September. The bloodbath at School No. 1 came at the end of a week in which two...
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Dim Young Things
Bright Young Things Produced by Doubting Hall Limited Written and directed by Stephen Fry from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies Distributed by Icon Film Distribution and Think Film, Inc. Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things is a vibrant, hectic, but finally disappointing adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, Vile Bodies (1930). Although Fry has assembled an...
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Polka Can’t Die
Rockford’s annual On the Waterfront festival is just the sort of thing I should like—in theory, at least. Held every Labor Day weekend since 1985, On the Waterfront is the largest community event in Rockford and features both local and national musical acts. The entire downtown is closed to all but foot traffic for three...
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The Call of Blood
We Americans pride ourselves on being a nation of rootless individuals, cut off from the history that chained Old Europe to a cycle of wars and revolutions and bound to one another not by ties of blood and soil but only by the bloodless abstraction of self-evident truths. Rooted in no one place, our corporate...
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The Grave Robbers
From the dry wash where they sat in camp chairs beneath an improvised ramada built of box-elder poles with armloads of cut greasewood laid on top, they could just make out, through the brush that obscured the wash, the wide, shallow cave arched thinly across the enigmatic yellow face of the opposing sandstone cliff. Lance...
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Redeployment of U.S. Forces Overseas: Long Overdue, Too Slow
Many Central Europeans who are now in their late middle age or older have fond memories of American soldiers in their midst. In France in 1944, nylon stockings and chocolates were the tools of seduction, resented by men and welcomed by ladies. In Germany in early 1945, the G.I. came to be seen as liberator,...
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What’s the Big Idea?
The Village Produced by Touchstone and Blinding Edge Pictures Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan Distributed by Buena Vista Pictures The Manchurian Candidate Produced and distributed byParamount Pictures Directed by Jonathan Demme Screenplay by Daniel Pyne from the novel by Richard Condon George Axelrod (1962 screenplay) María, Full of Grace (María, llena eres de...
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Where Have All the Nazis Gone?
Back in the 1960’s, as a graduate student at Yale, I kept hearing that the Germans had still not confronted their past. They would do so only when they understood that Hitler, as explained by German leftist historian Fritz Fischer, was not a Betriebsunfall (operational accident) but emerged from Germany’s history, which went in a...
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Rolling Home to Rockford
According to the official website of the Lake Michigan Circle Tour, if we had stuck to the prescribed route, our excursion would have taken us approximately 1,160 miles. Here on our 12th day out, however, we have just logged our 2,200th mile, and we are still 30 miles east of Rockford. My obsession with lighthouses...
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Fighting Among the Hedgerows
As a young college student, I accepted implicitly all the goals of the Civil Rights revolution. I believed firmly that schools should be integrated, even though the nearest thing to integration I had ever experienced was going to school with a part-Ojibwe in Superior, Wisconsin, a lily-white town in which black people were not allowed...
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Montage Mirage
Fahrenheit 9/11 Produced by Miramax Films and Dog Eat Dog Films Written and directed by Michael Moore Distributed by Lions Gate Films, Inc. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is shallow, manipulative, and malicious. It is also the slickest piece of cinematic propaganda since Sergei Eisenstein made Battleship Potemkin in 1925. Like Eisenstein’s film, Fahrenheit 9/11’s political...
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Remember the Texas Revolution
“Chicano Studies” departments at American universities portray the Battle of the Alamo as the triumph of the lawful rulers of Texas over a rowdy, drunken band of illegal aliens. Such a portrayal has a delicious irony to it, though it is mostly false. Almost always omitted from the Chicano version of events are several unsettling...
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One Moment in Time
“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?” “Over a hell, conceivably. There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation. Most of them are private.” Those words echo in my thoughts as we approach the building. Turner School, built in 1898, is...
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The Machine in the Desert
How many years has it been since I became acquainted with Moab, Utah? More than I had realized, apparently. When I first saw the place, a room at the Canyonlands Motel cost $19.95 per night, I recall, and you could get breakfast at the motel’s cafeteria, pleasantly located in the shade of a hoary cottonwood...
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Military Unintelligence
Nothing is riskier in life—at any rate, for those interested in discovering that elusive thing, the “truth”—than to assume that what one has personally experienced years ago can be a useful guide in judging present problems. It is particularly true when the time gap between the two exceeds 50 years. This said, I feel almost...
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Whose Museum? What Nation?
Nations define themselves by what they choose to remember. The growing complexity of the United States is suggested by the ever-expanding volume of her historical memories, the range of groups and events that are commemorated, often in the name of multiculturalism. Just look at the changing landscape of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., with...
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Consequences of E.U. Enlargement
The European Union underwent a major transformation last May. It was enlarged to 25 states when eight former communist countries—Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, and three Baltic republics—were formally admitted, as well as Malta and Cyprus. The union is now a political and economic giant of 450 million people, the largest single market...
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And Agamemnon Dead
Troy Produced by Warner Brothers and Plan B Films Directed by Wolfgang Petersen Screenplay by David Benioff Distributed by Warner Bros Control Room Produced by Andrew Rossi, Hani Salama, and Rosadel Varela Directed by Jehane Noujaim Distributed by Magnolia Pictures “Inspired by the Iliad.” These helpful words appear on-screen just before the final credits roll...
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The End of the Innocence
This town ain’t big This town ain’t small. It’s a little of both they say. And our ball club may be minor league But at least it’s Triple A. . . . We don’t worry ’bout the pennant much We just like to see the boys hit it deep There’s nothing like the view From...
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Make Mine Revenge, Please
The Punisher Produced by Marvel Enterprises Directed by Jonathan Hensleigh Screenplay by Michael France and Jonathan Hensleigh Distributed by Lions Gate Films Inc. Man on Fire Produced by Fox 2000 Pictures and Scott Free Productions Directed by Tony Scott Screenplay by Brian Helgeland from A.J. Quinnell’s novel Distributed by 20th Century Fox Film Corporation Mean...
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Whose Globe, Whose Europe?
A widely publicized essay, “The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism,” by John Ralston Saul, appeared in the March issue of Harper’s. It is an extended attack on the Enlightenment and its global effects, launched from the multicultural left, which dwells on the happy turn of events that has allowed “positive forms of...
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Honest Journalist
Why are the phrases “honest journalist” and “free press” so often greeted with a snicker? Of course, everyone exempts his own columnist or talking head from the general condemnation, but most Americans also exempt their own congressman from the universal condemnation of Congress as a body made up of toadies and swindlers. To see the...
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The Eudaemonic Serb
The Ritz Club, the casino arm of the venerable and resplendent hotel in Piccadilly, is, for the discriminating player with an 18th-century sense of what gambling is all about, “the other place.” Apart from the late John Aspinall’s hallowed sepulchre in Curzon Street, this subterranean alhambra is the only privately owned gambling club in London. ...
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The Warming of the West
We know that nothing in this world stays the same. What we do not know is how or why it doesn’t. Probably, this is because we do not need to know. After five or six years in western Wyoming, in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, I recognized what seemed a stable weather pattern. Summers...
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Failing America
The Soviet Communist Party used to devote a lot of attention to the problem of inefficient agriculture. The party’s Agrarian Policy Commission debated endlessly, throughout the final quarter-century of the Soviet state’s existence, how to improve the system. Should the state farm (sovkhoz) be made self-financing? Should the collective farm (kolkhoz) have its own heavy...
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Caution: Allegory Ahead
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Directed by Michel Gondry Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman Distributed by Focus Features The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) Produced by Ren Film Directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev Screenplay by Vladimir Moiseyenko and Aleksandr Novototsky Distributed by Kino International Allegory is a tricky undertaking. Its practitioners must conceal at first what they mean to...
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The Star Chamber
In 1975, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) launched a campaign for reparations for those Japanese who had been forced to evacuate the West Coast during World War II. A heavily financed lobbying effort came to fruition five years later when the House of Representatives passed a bill creating the Commission on Wartime Relocation and...
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Strictly Business
The other day, driving through North End Commons (a neighborhood a bit north of the Chronicles offices and to the west of our house), I noticed a florist, a friend of mine, out in front of another flower shop, chatting with the owner. The two businesses have coexisted now for over a year, though they...
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Cultural Suicide
Tonight, dear friends, is the eve of the Feast of Albertus Magnus. “Who he?” would be the response of most people who have gone to school since the end of World War II. Names like Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, Cicero and Cato, Alfred the Great and the Venerable Bede, while they may echo distantly...
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Playing With Beauty
If I seem to have become obsessed with the isomorphism of love and gambling, it is because, like an unexpected number in roulette on a particularly hazardous night, the subject just keeps coming up. Wherever I look, whether to a work of imaginative literature or to a story from real life, at once I note...
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As Cold as Charity
Did anybody notice when Catholic Christianity ceased to be a religion in the United States? Not when it stopped being a popular or even a permissible religion, but when it became simply a nonreligion? I ask this because a recent court decision in California threatens to launch a legal revolution, in a way that would...
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The Victory of Fear in Spain
If, as appears certain, Islamic terrorists planted the bombs that killed over 200 commuters and wounded 1,400 others on Madrid’s trains on March 11, the operation was singularly successful in achieving its political objectives. Until that morning, the Popular Party (PP) government of the former prime minister José Maria Aznar looked poised to win the...
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The Crux of the Matter
The Passion of the Christ Produced by Icon Productions Directed by Mel Gibson Screenplay by Benedict Fitzgerald and Mel Gibson Distributed by Newmarket Film Group I recently posted a review of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in my In the Dark section of our website (Chronicles-Magazine.org). I expressed my admiration for the film...
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Last Ride
Every city needs cemeteries, and not just for the obvious reason. Like public buildings and monuments, they are a visible—and spiritual—link to the city’s past, a reminder that others have traveled the path that we trod, and still others will follow in our footsteps. Placed prominently on the edge of residential or commercial areas or...
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Tax Slavery
The American Revolution, as all Americans are taught, began as a rebellion against unfair taxation; in the United States today, however, some 230 years after James Otis protested the Stamp Act, unimaginably higher taxes are imposed on the American people and collected by means that would have seemed tyrannical to George III. Britain had no...
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Genetic Roulette
Once, a long time ago, when, as a result of one of those complex misunderstandings that cast long shadows over the course of my life, I was getting married in a small town in Connecticut, my father showed up at the church stuffed with promotional literature. This consisted of leaflets describing his new organization, donation...
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Never the Twain Shall Meet
Maps show Wyoming beginning in the western Black Hills at its northeastern corner and east of the Laramie Mountains at the southeastern one. Yet the beginning of a thing (or, for that matter, its end) is rarely so simple. To me, it is obvious that Wyoming begins on the western slope of the Snowy Range...
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Pakistan’s Nuclear Proliferation
In a speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., on February 11, President Bush warned against the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and suggested measures to dismantle a growing black market in nuclear fuel and technology. He called the possibility of a sudden attack by weapons of mass destruction “the greatest...
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Monsters
Monster Produced by Zodiac Productions Inc. Written and directed by Patty Jenkins Distributed by Newmarket Film Group The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara Produced by @radical.media and Senart Films Directed by Errol Morris Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics In Monster, director Patty Jenkins rehearses yet again the pitiful...
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Inhuman Rights
Since the father of the French (and, by now, European) New Right, Alain de Benoist, sent me an inscribed copy of his most recent book, Au-Delà des Droits De L’Homme (Krisis, 2004), I read the text attentively. Like him, I have wondered why natural rights (now called human rights) have become, in the words of...
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Amnesty
Conservatives who saw through the fraud of the “temporary worker visa” program that President Bush unveiled in January and recognized it for the mass amnesty of illegal aliens it is might want to consider muting their fulminations against the concept of amnesty. If current demographic trends continue, they may find that they are in need...
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This Is the Time to Remember
Every city is made up of innumerable stories, some overlapping, most not. And, thus, every city needs many storytellers to provide a full account of its life, because—humans being finite—no one is likely to be able to encompass all of those stories in his work. Few cities, however, are so lucky. The best most cities...
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“Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man”
My father believed in progress almost to the end of his life, when changing his mind would scarcely have made any difference. Like most liberals, he regarded traditional institutions as so many barriers to man’s continued improvement, and yet, like most good men who are liberals, his head was contradicted by his heart: He despised...