Hannibal Produced and Distributed by Dino De Laurentiis and MGM Studios Directed by Ridley Scott Screenplay by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian from the novel by Thomas Harris Last Resort Produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation Directed by Paul Pavlikovsky Screenplay by Rowan Joffe and Paul Pavlikovsky Released by The Shooting Gallery The original newspaper...
Category: Columns
The Proletarian Weapon
No sooner had George W. Bush entered the White House and its previous occupants padded off to Harlem—with as much public swag as they could pack into the helicopters—than the news media suddenly began to discover “layoffs,” “downturns,” and a looming economic crisis that threatened to strip the flesh from the eight fat years that...
Two Rooms With a View
It has been the usual 56-hour day spent in airports under siege from CNN and microwave-burned pizza, cramped into buses, taxis, and the midget seats of American Airlines steerage with two varieties of undrinkable wine-product to wash down the “looks-like-chicken” alternative to the inevitable “pasta” they serve on flights to Italy, but now we are...
Robert Hanssen and the New Meaning of Treason
A year ago, Robert Philip Hanssen apparently felt the need to explain to the Russians his motives for supplying them with thousands of top-secret U.S. intelligence documents over the preceding decade and a half. The veteran FBI agent wrote them a letter, confessing that he is neither insanely brave, nor merely insane, but “insanely loyal”...
A Month in the Life of the Industrial Midwest
News Item: “Motorola Inc. will close its only U.S. cellular-phone manufacturing operation, putting 2,S00 of 5,000 people out of work to ease sagging profits amid increased global competition. Employees who will remain at the 1.3 million square-foot plant that opened in 1996 will focus on research, marketing and other activities for the cellular market…” (“Motorola...
Moments, Redeeming and Otherwise
Snatch Produced by Columbia Pictures Directed and Written by Guy Ritchie Released by Sony Pictures Shadow of the Vampire Produced by Saturn Films Directed by E. Elias Merhige Screenplay by Steven Katz Released by Lion Gate Films Thirteen Days Produced by Kevin Costner and Beacon Communications Directed by Roger Donaldson Screenplay by Ernest R. May...
The Conservative War on Property
Perhaps it is a delusion, like snow blindness, caused by the tons of dirty snow shoved into my driveway by the city plows and the sun’s annual disappearing act that drives even non-Scandinavians into melancholy and occasional fits of berserking frenzy, but I am beginning to be persuaded by our Chicago friend Tom Roeser that...
Sharon’s Victory and U.S. Policy in the Middle East
With the landslide victory of Ariel Sharon in the Israel general election on February 6, it is obvious that America needs to reevaluate its policy in the Middle East. A revised policy should be based on three key premises. First, Israel is a small foreign country. It is a friendly and democratic country, but by...
I’ve Got a Secret
Back in November and December, while Republicans across the country were writing letters, calling in to talk radio, and even taking to the streets to protest Al Gore’s attempt to steal the election in Florida, their fellow party members in Rockford remained strangely silent. They must have found it disquieting when the Bush campaign kept...
Odysseys
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Produced by Buena Vista Pictures and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Joel Coen Screenplay by Ethan Coen with help from Homer Released by Buena Vista Pictures All the Pretty Horses Produced by Columbia Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Billy Bob Thornton Screenplay by Ted Tally from a novel by Cormac...
The Conspiracy of Conspiracies
The scene is Rome, about A.D. 300. The Augustus Maximian has returned to the ancient capital to oversee the construction of the lavish baths that will bear the name of the senior Augustus, Diocletian. Although Maximian is a rough customer from the Balkans and speaks a tough-guy Latin that sounds more like Rumanian than the...
Will President Bush Resist the Global Interventionists?
In the second presidential debate last October, George W. Bush warned Vice President Gore that it is not America’s role to patrol the planet and to arrange other peoples’ lives in its own image. The United States must be proud and confident of our values, he said, “but humble in how we treat nations that...
A Balkans Policy for the New Administration
American policies in the Balkans over the past decade have come to embody all that is wrong with the fundamental assumptions of the decisionmakers in Washington. A thorough revision of those policies would be an important step toward a more pragmatic American strategy in world affairs based on the national interest. This is no longer...
Democracy and the Art of Handloading
Swish . . . creak—chunk. Swish . . . creak—chunk. At the top of the press stroke the lubricated brass shell rises into the top of the press frame where it is engaged by the sizing die, screwed down and secured by the locking nut. On the downstroke it catches momentarily in the die before...
Chaos and Community
I tune the radio to WLS, and the insistent voice of Tony Brown breaks me out of my trance. It’s Saturday, December 9, the day after a bitterly divided Florida Supreme Court stretched (and possibly broke) Florida law in order to allow a statewide recount of undervotes in the presidential election. My family and I...
Rout of the Republicans
The first thing to be said about the presidential election of 2000 is that George W. Bush and the Stupid Party lost miserably. This is true despite their actual victory in the great post-election Florida chicken-scratch because, without Ralph Nader on the ballot, Al Gore would have won the election easily. Nader’s votes in Florida...
Accidental Heroes, Ordinary Tragedies
Unbreakable Produced by Touchstone and Blinding Edge Pictures Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan Released by Buena Vista Pictures You Can Count on Me Produced by Cappa Production and The Shooting Gallery Written and Directed by Ken Lonergan Released by Paramount Classics Last year, M. Night Shyamalan performed a minor miracle: flouting Hollywood’s policy...
Free Greeks, Servile Americans
Conservatives are fond of saying that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and in their appeals to the national conscience, they invoke the sacred language of republican tradition, citing scriptures from Aristotle and Cicero, from Edmund Burke and George Washington: the ride of law, a virtuous citizenry, and ordered liberty. Like most...
NATO, R.I.P.
At the European Union summit in Nice last December France initiated plans for a new European military structure. While the stated purpose of the emerging 15-member alliance is to complement NATO rather than replace it, there is growing concern in Washington that the ultimate objective of French and German strategic planners is to sever the...
A Happy Hunting Ground
The alarm clock went off in the dark. In the light of the electric lantern, frost glittered on shadowed nylon walls. The inside zipper stuck; after a few futile tugs I escaped through the mouth of the mummy bag. I had on long Johns, wool socks, and a wool shirt; but the predawn cold bit...
It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over
October 26, 2000, dawned pretty much like every other day here in Rockford, Illinois. After ten years of living under the dictatorship of a federal magistrate, we had decided that nothing would ever change. And then something did. On that glorious Indian summer morning, the Illinois Supreme Court, by a vote of six to one,...
Details, Details
Dancer in the Dark Produced by AV-Fund Norway, Arte France Cinéma, and the Danish Film Institute Directed and written by Lars von Frier Distributed by Fine Line Features The Contender Produced by Battleground Productions Directed and written by Rod Lurie Distributed by DreamWorks Distribution Best in Show Produced by Castle Rock Entertainment Directed by Christopher...
Rediscovering Fire
What is paleoconservatism? The term seems to connect the American hard right with paleolithic anthropoids who wooed their women with clubs and ate raw meat because they were too stupid to discover fire. Even though Paul Gottfried and I are probably responsible for popularizing the term, I never adopted it, if only because it implies...
The End of Drought
Somewhere between Muddy Gap and the old uranium town of Jeffrey City I became aware of my lungs, painfully expanding and contracting inside my denim shirt. Beyond Jeffrey City the smoke cloud was visible to the northwest, a pinkish-grey mass hanging on the mountainous horizon and planed along its upper edge by atmospheric winds: large...
The Constitution, R.I.P.
On July 22 of this year, the Washington Times published, as the weekly installment of its “Civil War” section, a long article by a gentleman named Mackubin Thomas Owens, described as “professor of strategy and force planning” at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, under the headline, “Secession’s apologists gut Constitution, history.” The...
Sentiment and Sentimentality
Nurse Betty Produced by Gramercy Pictures and Propaganda Films Directed by Neil LaBute Screenplay by John C. Richards and James Flamberg Distributed by USA Films Almost Famous Produced by DreamWorks and Vinyl Films Directed and written by Cameron Crowe Distributed by Dreamworks There’s a crucial difference between sentiment and sentimentality. The first is a direct,...
Hand-Me-Down Truth
In 1912, a group of Oxford fellows began meeting to work out a minimalist common creed that would be acceptable to all Christians. William Temple, future archbishop of Canterbury, was the guiding spirit of the group, which argued its way down to an inoffensive consensus entitled Foundations. The Oxford Seven ended up setting aside miracles,...
National Missile-Defense Deployment Postponed
On September 1, President Clinton announced that he would leave to his successor the decision on whether to move from research and development to deployment of the National Missile Defense (NMD). The announcement to shelve the NMD was long overdue. The United States came very close to spending billions of dollars—and risking a confrontation with...
The Alternative Candidate
Several thousand feet below a smoke cloud 20,000 feet thick and 1,500 miles in diameter, the American West looks so peaceful, so at ease, so normal, no matter that over a million acres of it are on fire. The fires, most of them started by dry lightning strikes and burning out overmature forests thickened with...
Are We Decadent?
If there is one premise that serves to unite the Old Right, it is that the West—or America, or Christendom, or whatever label and identity they want to specify—is in trouble, has been in trouble for a long time, and is probably not going to get out of trouble for quite a while, if ever....
Making Choices, Taking Chances
The Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur le pont) Produced by Films Christian Fechner and France 2 Cinéma Directed by Patrice Leconte Screenplay by Serge Frydman Released by Paramount Pictures Saving Grace Produced by Homerun Productions and Portman Entertainment Group Distributed by Fine Line Features Directed by Nigel Cole Screenplay by Mark Crowdy and...
Vote Claudius: He’ll Leave Your Sons Alone
When Edmund Burke called perfect democracy “the most shameful thing in the world,” he was not referring to the mixed forms of popular government that had existed in ancient Greece and Rome, much less to the newly liberated English colonies that had been struggling to form “a more perfect union” on the Eastern seaboard of...
Mexico Under New Management: Wish Them Well, and Build That Fence
Because of illegal immigration, there is no other country that affects America’s way of life as profoundly as does Mexico. Its politics should he followed, therefore, with the same attention to detail that characterized Kremlinology at the height of the Cold War. Instead, there was an air of unreality to the hundreds of American editorials...
A Cowboy at Caramoor
It’s a long ride to hear Andrea Marcovicci, the Maria Calks of cabaret, in concert after I missed her in Billings a couple of years ago. At Katonah, New York, I checked into the first motel I saw, snubbing the horse between a Lexus and a VW bus covered with flower decals, left over from...
The Best Reality Money Can Buy?
The Perfect Storm Produced by Baltimore Spring Creek and Warner Bros. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen Screenplay by William D. Wittliff, based on Sebastian Junger’s book Released by Warner Bros. The Patriot Produced by Centropolis Entertainment and Mutual Film Company Directed by Roland Emmerich Screenplay by Robert Rodat Released by Columbia Pictures With few exceptions, there...
Our Constitutional Covenant With Death
“The compact which exists between the North and the South,” proclaimed William Lloyd Garrison in an abolitionist declaration of 1843, “is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” When the Southern states concluded that they were no longer bound by what their enemies regarded as a compact with the devil. Garrison and his...
The International Criminal Court: Clinton’s Frankenstein’s Monster
For years, the Clinton-Gore administration has been in the forefront of efforts to create international judicial bodies—such as the Yugoslav war-crimes “tribunal” at The Hague—that could be used as auxiliary tools of diplomatic decisionmaking in Washington. Madeleine Albright liked the façade of legality that could be invoked to justify their policies. All along, of course,...
A European Defense?
Be careful what you wish for, goes the old adage. You just might get it. So it is with America’s desire that the Europeans do more for their own defense. The E.U. has proposed the development of a European rapid reaction force of 60,000 men. Although it will be some time before such a unit...
Processions of the Damned
“Well, fellow, who are you?” demands the Earl of Warwick of a character who appears on stage for the first time at the end of George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan. “I,” huffs the man who has just burned Joan of Arc at the stake, “am not addressed as fellow, my lord. I am the...
Season Your Admiration
Mission: Impossible 2 Produced by Cruise-Wagner Productions and Paramount Pictures Directed by John Woo Screenplay by Robert Towne Released by Paramount Pictures Hamlet Produced by Double A Films Directed by Michael Almereyda Screenplay by Michael Almereyda, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet Released by Miramax Films Small Time Crooks Produced by Sweetland Films Directed by Woody Allen Screenplay...
Burn This Book
Why do we send our children to school, much less to a college or a university? I have put this question to any number of parents, teachers, and headmasters and only rarely received a better answer than “So they can get a good job.” Never having had what most people would call a good job,...
Hoisting the Donkey
In troubled times, we look for something to hold on to as the dangerous currents are sweeping us downstream to destruction. Some will have the clear sight (or unthinking prejudice) to grab on to some rooted feature of the landscape—the limb of an oak tree, the steeple of a church, the arm of a brother;...
Peking, the White House, and Wall Street Versus Main Street
In the last week of May, the Clinton administration successfully pressed Congress into granting China permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status as part of a recently negotiated trade pact. With that vote—the result of an unholy alliance between the GOP and the White House—American legislators have given up their annual review of Peking’s conduct, surrendering...
The Centaur
I used to make fun of them, those barelegged, ball-capped figures grunting under the weight of 90-pound loads giving them the appearance of Neil Armstrong on the moon or a man bearing his own coffin on his back: tall, headless silhouettes lurching from around a bend in the trail to dispel the illusion of primordial...
Capitalism the Enemy
By a margin of 63-56, the South Carolina House of Representatives voted on May 10 to pull down the Confederate battle flag that has fluttered above the state’s capitol dome since 1962 and to remove it to “a place of honor” on the capitol grounds. The vote was the grand (or perhaps the petty) finale...
A Revolution to Save the World
“Beyond Left and Right” was the tide of the Antiwar.com conference which brought together Pat Buchanan and Alexander Cockburn, Justin Raimondo and Lenora Fulani (to say nothing of two Chronicles editors) in the same room (if not all at the same time) for a broad critique of the aggressive New World Order launched by the...
Gore’s Foreign Policy: More of the Same, Only Worse
We have always known that a Gore presidency would continue the flawed foreign policy of the Clinton administration; but now we know that—unlikely as it may sound—things may be even worse if the Vice President wins in November. On the last day of April, Al Gore gave his first major foreign policy speech of the...
The Phantom Horse
“What does ‘AQHA 1990 gelding, bred Actual Spark’ mean?” “It means someone has a neutered ten-year-old American quarter-horse, sired by Actual Spark, for sale. Why?” Rhonda looked up from the Casper Star-Tribune she held spread in her lap. “I want to buy a horse.” “What sense does that make? You’re moving back to California in...
The Revolution Two-Step
The new century, not to speak of the new pseudo-millennium, had not even begun last December when one of the scintillating debates typical of the intellectual life of our epoch suddenly erupted over the issue of who was the most important person of the old century. Time decided that it was undoubtedly Albert Einstein, neoconservative...
Why Don’t We Mind Our Own Business?
“You can fool some of the people all of the time,” said W.C. Fields quoting Lincoln, “and those odds are good enough for me.” Fields also said that, in a presidential election, he never voted for anyone, only against, and this time around contrarians could have, well, a Field day, since George W. Bush and...