It’s springtime once again in Rockford, when a young man’s fancy turns to bailing out his basement. The old downtown and the residential neighborhoods built up through the 1940’s sit on clay soil, on top of rock. The effect, when the spring rains come and the dry clay cannot absorb the water quickly enough, is...
Category: Columns
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A Good Hitman Is Not So Hard to Find
Assassination Tango Produced by American Zoetrope and Butchers’ Run Films Written and directed by Robert Duvall Distributed by MGM and United Artists Phone Booth Produced by Fox 2000 Pictures Directed by Joel Schumacher Screenplay by Larry Cohen Distributed by 20th Century Fox Are good hitmen really hard to find? Not if you go to the...
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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. ...
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Bury the Facts at Wounded Knee
At Wounded Knee Creek, on December 29, 1890, the last fight of any size or significance between the U.S. Army and American Indians occurred. Although a terrible tragedy involving the loss of Indian women and children, the battle has been wildly mischaracterized, especially by those bent on making the Indian an innocent victim of the...
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Infamies
Exactly 60 years before the terrorist attacks of 2001, September 11 became a day of infamy for many Americans because of what Col. Charles A. Lindbergh said to an audience in Des Moines, Iowa, that day. Speaking as a member of the America First Committee, Lindbergh warned his listeners, in words that immediately became world-famous,...
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A Road Map to Nowhere?
In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, its most determined advocates predictably claimed that the United States should proceed with her alleged mission of bringing democracy to the Middle East. The advocates of this approach seek to push the Israeli-Palestinian issue into the background, to subordinate it to whatever their agenda may be in...
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How the West Was Won—Again
Richard M. Weaver, in his discussion of forms and the concept of the formal in Ideas Have Consequences, has this to say about the custom and culture of the American frontier: The American frontiersman was a type who emancipated himself from culture by abandoning the settled institutions of the seaboard and the European motherland. Reveling...
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War Is Hell on the Homefront, Too
Depending on whether you like them thin and greasy or thick and meaty, the two best purveyors of french fries in Rockford are Uncle Nick’s Gyros on East State Street and Altamore’s Ristorante on North Main. Neither the mythical Uncle Nick nor the very real Alberto Altamore, I’m happy to report, has fallen prey to...
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Justice Blinded
Dark Blue Produced by Alphaville Films and Cosmic Pictures Directed by Ron Shelton Screenplay by David Ayer and James Ellroy Distributed by United Artists Daredevil Produced and distributed by 20th Century Fox Written and directed by Mark Steven Johnson Ron Shelton’s Dark Blue opens with the infamous video of Rodney King taking a beating at...
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Men in Black
The U.S. Supreme Court is like one of those dinosaur reconstructions at which children gape when they are taken to a museum. Not only is the Court today an imaginative reconstruction of something that no longer actually exists, it is so huge an institution that few Americans are able to take it in all at...
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Goodbye, Senator McCarthy
Hold on, let me make sure my word processor is in full Cliché Mode: “The specter of Senator McCarthy walks again in contemporary America.” Yes, that seems to be working properly. Particularly over the past couple of years, we’ve heard a great deal about McCarthy and McCarthyism. The name surfaces whenever a government agency identifies...
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Treason Prospers
As I (along with just about every other armchair strategist in the Western world) correctly predicted last year, the United States launched her war against Iraq in the early spring of 2003, but by the time she did so, the path of treason along which this country had been dragged to war was plain to...
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Turkish Delights
Four weeks before the latest war against Iraq, President George W. Bush declared that it would be motivated by a “vision” of democracy and liberation for the entire Middle East. A U.S.-sponsored regime change in Baghdad, he proclaimed, would “serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.” Only...
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Plus ça Change . . .
In the December 27, 2002, issue of the English edition of Forward, self-described Orthodox Jew David Klinghoffer attacks Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for his recent book Two Hundred Years Together. In this historical work, Solzhenitsyn deals with Jews and Russians living side by side from 1775, when Russia came to occupy the heavily Jewish regions of Eastern...
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Ten Years Later
The Hundredth Meridian is now a decade old in conception, though a year short of that in reality. It had its origin in a biweekly column I was hired by James Hill to write in the winter and spring of 1993 for the Sunday Perspective section of the Arizona Republic, which James was editing at...
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This Is Your Hometown
About two years ago, I wrote a “Letter From Rockford” entitled “A Month in the Life of the Industrial Midwest” (April 2001), in which I used excerpts from news reports to illustrate the rather dramatic economic changes that were taking place in the Rockford area—plant closings, layoffs, declining wages. At the time, I had no...
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Be Afraid of Virginia Woolf
The Hours Produced by Scott Rudin and Miramax Films Directed by Stephen Daldry Screenplay by David Hare from Michael Cunningham’s novel Distributed by Paramount Pictures Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Produced by Andrew Lazar and Miramax Films Directed by George Clooney Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman from the book by Chuck Barris Distributed by Artisan Entertainment...
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Living the Jacobin Dream
In 1793, the Jacobins, surfing the wave of Parisian mob violence, intimidated their less resolute colleagues into eliminating both the principle of monarchy and the existence of its politically superfluous incarnation, Louis XVI. Not content with killing a living king and pronouncing a death sentence in absentia on all the princes of the blood who...
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The Myth of Red Brotherhood
Second only to the myth of Indian as ecologist is that of red brotherhood. Although physically similar, the Indian peoples of what is today the United States were a diverse lot. There was no common language, culture, or identity. A few groups of Indians evolved political organizations—the Iroquois League of the Five Nations was the...
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The Empire’s New Clothes
Not the least of the several noticeable ironies that attend the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st is that, when the logically appropriate moment for the declaration of a formal American Empire arrived during the half-century of conflict with the Soviet Union, the empire failed to emerge. Today, well after...
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Europe Skeptical About NATO Enlargement
On November 21, 2002, NATO leaders meeting in Prague invited seven ex-communist nations to join their ranks in an expansion termed “historic.” The three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (the alliance will, for the first time, include former Soviet territory), as well as Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Rumania are expected to become full...
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Pakistan, Our Untrustworthy Partner
As the first contingent of U.N. weapons inspectors arrived in Iraq last November, U.S. government sources leaked a disturbing story about one of our key “allies” in the War on Terror. Pakistan apparently has been helping North Korea with her nuclear-weapons program for years, in return for missile technology that would strengthen her own hand...
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A Road to Nowhere
“That’s my toll booth,” Tom Ditzler says, laughing when his wife, Jan, mentions the portable toilet that the county has left stationed on an island in the road. “Every car has to drop a quarter in as they pass by.” This November day is bitter, in more ways than one. After almost three years of...
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The Sorrows of Solipsism
Solaris Produced by James Cameron and 20th Century Fox Directed by Steven Soderbergh Screenplay by Steven Soderbergh from Stanislaw Lem’s novel Distributed by 20th Century Fox Adaptation Produced by Propaganda Films Directed by Spike Jonze Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman from The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean Distributed by Columbia Pictures Steven Soderbergh’s...
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FDR: The Moral Reckoning
Dear Editor: Attached please find the proposal for my latest book, Franklin Roosevelt: The Anti-christ Unmasked. While I know some people will dismiss my thesis as foolish (or even “crazy”), the wave of recent books published by major presses like yours gives me reason to hope that the truth can at last be told. I...
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Imperialism From the Cradle to the Grave
In the first year of Cyrus the king the same Cyrus the king made a decree concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, Let the house be builded, the place they offered sacrifices, and let the foundations thereof be strongly laid. Mesopotamia was the cradle of empires, but it was also their grave, as the...
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The Strange Death of the Yellow Dog
Perusing the conservative press in the days after the Republican victories in the November 2002 elections was like watching the triumph scenes in various sword-and-sandal movies of the 1950’s and 60’s, with the reader almost expecting to see outgoing Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle dragged in chains through the streets of Washington. The Stupid Party...
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Turkey Goes Islamic
On November 3, Islam triumphed politically in Turkey, rendering the entire U.S. strategy in the Middle East tenuous and causing dismay in Europe. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, barred from public office for Islamic agitation, led his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to a landslide victory over his secularist opponents in NATO’s only Muslim nation. Muslims will...
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Elk Hunting in High Heels
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Having slept on the hard ground in single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, tramped all day through a snowstorm at 11,000 feet of elevation against a 40-mile-an-hour wind with a 20-pound survival pack and a seven-pound...
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We Are All Socialists Now
Rockford has long been a Republican city, which is not surprising considering that industry—at least through the 1980’s and, to a lesser extent, even now—has formed the basis of her economy. Today, however, Rockford is becoming increasingly Democratic. I do not necessarily mean that Democrats have begun to dominate city politics. Even though the mayorship...
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Plymouth Rocked
Far From Heaven Produced by Clear Blue Sky Productions Written and Directed by Todd Haynes Distributed by Focus Features and USA Films Auto Focus Produced by Propaganda Films Directed by Paul Schrader Screenplay by Michael Gerbosi from Robert Graysmith’s book Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven and Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus...
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Singing the Internationale
As the U.S. government prepared to go to war with Iraq, the Bush administration worked simultaneously on two strategies to justify its position. Making its case to the U.N. Security Council, American representatives stressed the need for a multinational front against terrorism and called for a new, more vigorous resolution against Iraq’s “weapons of mass...
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A Welcome Anniversary
On July 13, the German weekly Junge Freiheit celebrated its 15th anniversary. This is astonishing, considering the outrages committed against the publication, including the burning of its printing facilities in 1994 and the five-year-long public warning against the paper issued by the provincial government of Nord-rhein-Westfalen for “intimations of a disposition sympathetic to the far...
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Comrade King?
Twenty years have come and gone since Congress passed, and President Reagan signed into law, a bill creating a federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., and, in those years, the holiday has become little more than yet another session in the perennial ritual of mass production and consumption that American public festivals generally celebrate. ...
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Baghdad or Pyongyang?
Last October, North Korea announced that it has a nuclear-weapons program. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confirmed that North Korea already has a “small number” of nuclear weapons, and a Pentagon official later added that the United States thought Pyongyang had two nuclear bombs. The stunning revelations sent shockwaves around the world, but the White House...
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Trench Warfare
War talk was running high when they threw the loaded packs in back of the Gold Pony and left Flagstaff, headed north across the Navajo Reservation. Television and the newspapers had nothing to say about anything except the towering evil of Hubbub Ihnssain, while National Public Radio had suspended All Things Considered to concentrate on...
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I’m Not a Number
I stepped through the metal detector and walked down the long hallway to the old entrance to the Winnebago County Court-house, a monument to less security-conscious days. In Room 502, I joined about 200 other citizens, waiting to do our civic duty. Signing in, I received my badge: no name, just a number—Juror 11593. I...
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Cinematic Imagination Under Siege
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Produced and Distributed by Allied Artists Pictures Corporation and Walter Wanger Productions Directed by Don Siegel Screenplay by Jack Finney and Daniel Mainwaring I recently proposed Don Siegel’s 1956 science-fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers as required viewing for directors who have lost their way. I was thinking...
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Boethius and/or Cassiodorus
American conservatives used to be fond of saying that the United States have entered a decadent period something like that of the Roman Empire. Since American conservatives do not read history, they were never very clear on the period they had in mind, but let us assume they mean the third century, when the empire...
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The Modern Myth of the Black Cowboy
“Nigger Charley” Tyler rode the range of the Owens Valley in the trans-Sierra country of California during the early 1860’s. He was one of the hired hands of the ranching McGee family, who grazed their beeves in the valley and then drove them north to market at the booming mining camp of Aurora. Paiute Indians,...
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World War IV
Be not deluded, just because the United States goes to war with Iraq, that our leaders will not also extend to the entire Middle East the jihad on which President Bush and his court of neoconservative gurus and Zionist Weltpolitikers have embarked us. Well before any public announcement of whether we would actually make war...
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Prophesying War
As the summer before the first anniversary of the September 11 attack drew to a sweltering end, the Bush administration desperately sought some plausible reason for the war against Iraq that its chieftains so desperately wanted to wage. The appeal to the “weapons of mass destruction” that Saddam Hussein supposedly harbors and which he was...
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Serbia’s Presidential Election
The current president of the soon-to-be-defunct Yugoslav Federation, Vojislav Kostunica, has won the initial stage of Serbia’s presidential elections, the first held since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic almost exactly two years ago. Kostunica garnered 31 percent of the vote, with Miroljub Labus—the “pro-Western, reformist” candidate supported by the “international community”—coming in second at 28...
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Western Swing
The Hollows, Hasty and Happy, were hardly ever sure where they were. At times, they weren’t sure who they were, either, but it never mattered for them because they were very, very rich. Hasty was from Chicago originally, and Happy from Mississippi, where she had earned half a degree from Ole Miss. In the days...
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Of Priests and Peducators
Over the past decade, I have been involved in public debate over the problem of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and that experience has taught me a great deal about the way people come to understand—or, rather, misunderstand—social problems. My point is simple enough. While some priests have undoubtedly been abusive, and a few have...
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The Cohn Zone
I suppose it was appropriate that I first heard the commercial just as we crossed into Winnebago County, returning from a whirlwind weekend trip to Michigan. At first, the words didn’t register; it was only when I heard the voice of Kris Cohnor rather, Kristine O’Rourke Cohn, since it is an election year, after all—in...
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Unutterable Visions, Perishable Breath
S1m0ne Produced and Distributed by New Line Cinema Written and directed by Andrew Niccol One Hour Photo Produced by Catch 23 Entertainment, Laughlin Park Pictures, and Madjak Films Written and directed by Mark Romanek Distributed by 20th Century Fox Why do we expect perfection, especially when it comes to romance, that most mercurial department of...
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In Praise of the Clan
A new Dark Age is already upon us, and perhaps we might learn a few lessons from the last one. It was a time when the arts of civilization were dimly recalled in fairy tales, when Krum the Bulgar khan gilded a Roman emperor’s skull and used it as a drinking goblet, when the careful...
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Hate, Inc.
No sooner had victory in Afghanistan by the forces of Truth, Beauty, and Global Democracy been announced and the still uncaptured and undeceased Osama bin Laden declared by President Bush to be “unimportant” (no doubt the reason the administration put a $25-million reward on his head last fall) than the top-ranking officials of the U.S....
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The Coming War in Iraq: Dangerous and Unnecessary
In the final years of the Soviet Union, as glasnost broadened the scope of permissible public debate, it was still deemed advisable to precede any expression of controversial views with a little disclaimer. For example, “While I hold no brief for the Islamic dushmans terrorizing the people of Afghanistan, I think we should withdraw from...