A sign above the cafe adjacent to the motel across the highway from the railroad tracks in Lordsburg, New Mexico, proclaimed the good news in faded red letters on a flaking white background. “Whiskey and water,” I told the waitress when she came with her pencil and pad. “No bar,” she explained. “But there’s a...
Category: Columns
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Gnostic Newt
The hallmark of the sophomoric mind is that it knows the sorts of things that adult minds do but has not yet figured out how to do them. Bright undergraduates who solemnly inform their professors that they plan to write term papers applying what they have read about the latest fads of pop psychology to...
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Haiti and American Empire
Think of all the ink spilled on foreign policy during the 80’s. Yet for all of Clinton’s “accomplishments” on foreign policy (Middle East “peace,” NAFTA, Haiti), the subject did not even appear on the political radar screen during the 1994 elections. Frankly, voters do not care, and no fact of American political life brings a...
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Fallen Walls
I studied the weather for four days before making a break for the south, slipping between the winter storms along icepacked roads wreathed with snowsnakes across sun-glazed plains in the direction of the Salt Lake Valley, where much of the snow had evaporated, under a stiff northwesterly wind and horses and cattle at American Fork...
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Turning Rights into Wrongs
How Democracies Perish was the subject, as well as the title, of an important book by Jean-Francois Revel. M. Revel is a hardheaded journalist who takes little interest in political theory, but he is a keen observer of the corruption into which the states of the West have fallen. When I had drinks with him...
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Enclosure
Late in the afternoon of the day before the final day of elk season I parked the truck and trailer above Blue Jay Creek north of Krall’s ranch and rode into the mountains against a cold wind and the lowering sun. In spite of having been kicked on the cannon bone in her off rear...
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Allied Crimes Against Humanity
The book cannot be closed on World War II until the American and British people know the full story of the crimes their governments committed against anticommunist Russians, Yugoslavs, and others who desperately wanted to avoid Soviet terror and who, nevertheless, were turned over to Stalin’s killer squads—all in violation of American and British traditions...
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Racial Politics
Whatever the new Republican majority does with the immense congressional power it seized in last November’s elections, it will probably be unimportant compared to the force that started to emerge in the same elections and which the national leadership of the Republican Party, and even more the Democratic Party, tried to ignore, denounce, and destroy....
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The Great Portcullis
In the third week of August someone pushes the button and brings summer to an end in the Mountain West, though beautiful weather and Indian summer lie ahead. Typically the change comes with the discharge of a powerful thunder cell, seemingly no different from any other electrical storm but collapsing into a gray leaden overcast...
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Crime and Welfare
Every few months the gentlemen of the press discover a new threat to humanity that requires decisive government action. Not so long ago the United States Senate, alarmed by reports of a comet striking the planet Jupiter, actually took up the question of protecting the earth against a similar calamity. Conservatives smile, but in the...
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Globo-Cop
No small irony attended the announcement by FBI Director Louis Freeh on July 4 of last year that his bureau was establishing a “legal attache” office in Moscow, and not only because the agency of the U.S. government historically responsible for counterespionage had finally penetrated the capital city of its old adversary. July 4, as...
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Abbey Lives!
Fifteen years after I arrived in the West, I can no longer recall how I first became aware of Edward Abbey, though I do know that I had been the book editor of a national magazine for nearly four years before the name penetrated my consciousness. (The parochialism of the New York literati.) But I...
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The Lesson of the Roaring Parrot
There is an old cliche that no man is a hero to his valet. Some have been tempted to reply that it depends on the man, but I think it depends, rather, on the valet. To an observant eye, the world is peopled by ordinary men making strenuous, even heroic efforts to get through the...
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Religious Wrong
Despite the ocean of ink that has been spilled in the last several months on the “religious right,” perhaps the most sensible comment about it, or at least about its journalistic coverage and political analysis, was penned by John F. Persinos in an article published in the magazine Campaigns and Elections last September. “When examined...
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The Home of the Brave
Vague and acrid as the ocherous smoke drifting in scarves and shoals from fires burning across the West, the specter of Range Reform pervaded the Rocky Mountain states last summer, the driest on record since 1932. In drought years ranchers must move their cattle rapidly off one pasture and onto the next in order to...
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Why Monkeys Get Fat in Banana Republics
Much to no one’s surprise, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon was elected President of Mexico this past August. There were the usual cries of foul both from the opposition parties and from citizens’ groups monitoring the election: insufficient ballots were provided to certain polling places where the opposition was strong, so it was said, and...
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Myths to Kill For
“I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list,” twitters the Lord High Executioner in a famous line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and indeed these days who doesn’t have one? Abortion protester Paul Hill seems to have had a little list of his own, and early in the morning on July 28 of...
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The Abortion Gambit
Trying to be the chief intellectual in the Republican Party is probably a little like trying to be an admiral in the Swiss navy, but in the last year or so, that is more or less what Bill Kristol has become. The son of neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, young Bill made his bones by billing...
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Work Suspended
If compensation is possible for a summer so brief that the growing season is limited to 55 days at best, it is the most beautiful Indian summer on earth climaxed by elk season in the last two weeks of October. While friends of mine, here and elsewhere, seem politely convinced that writing is merely a...
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A Philanthropic Journalist
If representative government requires a free press, as the founders of this Republic believed, then it is small wonder that the citizens of the United States no longer enjoy the benefit of free elections. For elections to be free, there must be a choice from among well-defined positions and characters: John Quincy Adams or Andrew...
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De-Americanization
Although the summer of 1994 produced no entertainments to rival the fun of last year’s Jurassic Park, let alone the previous summer’s Los Angeles riots, it did yield up the brief but amusing manhunt for O.J. Simpson and the edifying spectacle of the wanted killer of his ex-wife and her pretty young companion cruising up...
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View From a Campfire
“Been up the Hams Fork yet?” “I took a drive there last weekend.” “How far did you get?” “Almost to the guard station. There’s a hellacious mudhole just south of it.” “How about Fontenelle?” “I ain’t tried it myself, but they say it’s dry to the Forest boundary. There’s two foot of snow yet past...
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On Liberal Education
My definition of liberal education as the education of liberals no longer sounds provocative. Liberalism, having failed and failed disastrously in all its political experiments from church disestablishment to women’s suffrage to food stamps, still reigns triumphant, with hardly a rival, in the empty corridors of the Western mind. How failed? The church is disestablished,...
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Secessionist Fantasies
Throughout the first half of the present year, “secession” became the new watchword for a growing number of people on the American right. Economist Walter Williams has written at least two newspaper columns openly advocating secession. Jeffrey Tucker of the Ludwig von Mises Institute describes secession as “the cutting-edge issue that defines today’s anti-statism,” and...
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Give Me Wilderness, Or Give Me . . .
Better than anyone before or since, Frederick Jackson Turner explained the peculiarly American fascination with wilderness that continues to perplex and, occasionally, to annoy European observers. In his instantly famous paper delivered before the American Historical Association’s annual meeting 101 years ago. Professor Turner declared, “American social development has been continually beginning over and over...
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Equality or Privilege
“Everything in American politics always comes down to the race question,” says one of our collaborators. School choice plans, for example, are either condemned for enabling the white middle classes to liberate their children from the hell of public schools or praised for giving black families the prospect of sending their children to the suburbs....
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The Violent West
The matador who received top billing was not, as advertised, the most famous bullfighter in Spain but rather (we guessed) his son, or perhaps his nephew or second cousin; also, the promised dinner with this matador, to have been arranged by a (self-identified) associate of the Plaza Monumental in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the evening before...
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In Praise of Sex and Violence
All the best authorities agree: there is too much sex and violence in America. Social critics say that pop culture is reinforcing a cult of violence, which they trace back to the savage days of the American frontier; preachers launch jeremiads at the explicit eroticism of MTV, and Planned Parenthood pretends to have the jumps...
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The New Meaning of Conservatism
One of the most amazing and alarming features of the managerial system in the United States is its capacity to alter the meaning of things without changing their external appearance. This property is essentially what the Old Right political analyst Garet Garrett observed in his insight about “revolution within the form,” a concept he drew...
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Groundhog Days, Javelina Nights
How a people as addicted to novelty as the modern American public can remain indifferent to an experience restricted to the last three or four of the thousands of human generations, drawing their airplane window shades to watch a movie or study an organizational chart, is—or ought to be—a subject of major interest to the...
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Mother Goose vs. Hell
To read the newspapers, one would think there was a health care debate going on in the United States. But the word “debate” implies two parties, and the spectrum of the current discussions is limited to the deeper shades of pink, since neither the white flag of reaction nor the black flag of anarchy is...
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Forty Years After
Americans have grown fond of celebrating anniversaries of one kind or another. I first noticed this new habit during the national thrombosis over the Statue of Liberty back in 1986, but more recently the habit has swollen into something like an epidemic. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, we have endured the anniversaries of...
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29,000 Leaseholders
The war on the West is not going badly—from a Westerner’s point of view. As of mid-February, salient victories included the successful filibuster, by Western senators, of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s range reform bill; the routing of the obnoxious Representative Mike Synar (Democrat-OK), the congressional instigator of “reform”; the firing of the arrogant Jim Baca...
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Southern Men, American Persons
“Sweet home Alabama / Where the skies are so blue.” It has been many years since anyone made money from patriotic songs dedicated to Illinois or New Jersey. Chicago and New York have their anthems of course, to say nothing of San Francisco, but no one is going to get into a fight over “the...
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Beam Us Out
On a morning in April 1990, practitioners of the journalistic craft received in their mail a communication from one Jack Lichtenstein, at that time the director of public affairs for the National Endowment for the Arts, an agency then embroiled in a desperate onslaught by an army of Philistines, voters, and taxpayers who imagined that...
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Present for the Duration
Kemmerer, Wyoming: Population 3,500, more or less; throw in another thousand or so for Frontier and Diamondville, the three together making Greater Kemmerer. Five churches, two Mormon stake houses. The Lincoln County Courthouse and the Lincoln County Law Enforcement Facility (late 20th century term meaning Sheriff’s Office). Five motels, two supermarkets and an ALCO store,...
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Turn Out the Lights
It must have been Sigmund Freud who observed that whenever a new technology appears it is applied almost immediately to some sexual purpose. The dirty old man of Vienna was thinking of such inventions as the photograph and the moving picture, which gave a new impetus to the production and consumption of pornography, but he...
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Don’t Tread on Us
In the closing days of 1993 two familiar specters, recently absent from our nightmares, returned to haunt the global consciousness: the Russian bear, in the person of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Yellow Peril, in the form of North Korea. There were, of course, other bugbears to frighten the children of democracy—the parade of new Hitlers...
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Global Retch
Nearly four years after George Bush, on the eve of the Persian Gulf War, first popularized the expression “New World Order,” is there anyone in the United States who does not greet that phrase with either a grin of sarcasm or a growl of hatred? The answer, in a nutshell, is yes. The expression may...
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War on the West
Maybe because the Sage Brush Rebellion coincided with the energy boom of the late 70’s and early 80’s when Western industrialists and developers were firmly in the saddle, its rhetoric rarely, if ever, achieved the intensity that Rocky Mountain politicians and other public spokesmen have used in denouncing the Clinton administration’s efforts to redesign the...
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Men Unlimited
The comic, as Flannery O’Connor said, is the reverse side of the terrible. I suppose the spectacle of 50 to 100 men from 20 to 70 years of age disguised in Wild Man and Coyote masks as they prance in a forest glade, beat drums, eat buffalo chili, and exorcise the demon spirits of their...
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A Banner With a Strange Device
As the House of Representatives slithered toward its vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement last November, the regiments of lobbyists who were peddling the pact set up their tents in what the New York Times described as “a stately conference room on the first floor of the Capitol, barely an elevator ride away...
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The Ruined Tenement
“Every child should be taught to respect the sanctity of his neighbor’s house, garden, fields, and all that is his.” When James Fenimore Cooper insisted upon the inviolability of property, his conviction was as much the fruit of personal experience as it was the expression of his old-fashioned reverence for law and order. Upon returning...
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The New Populism
In the 12 months since Bill Clinton stumbled into the White House, the most notable political events in the country have consisted neither of his own successes and failures nor of the triumphs and achievements of what purports to be the administration’s loyal opposition in the Republican Party. Mr. Clinton’s performance in his first year...
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Out Where the West Began
Flying home from the East, I usually honor crossing the Mississippi as the occasion for my first double dry martini, which means that passing the Hundredth Meridian, equidistant between the towns of Kearney and North Platte, Nebraska, is generally the cause for celebrating with the second. For at least a century and a half, the...
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Middle American Gothic
The bad weather of 1993 eliminated my usual fishing trips to northern Wisconsin, but the other day in Madison, where I go to use the library and relive the 60’s, I saw a sign for an instant oil change and lube: “Faster than an Illinois tourist.” Most people in Wisconsin are happy for the dollars...
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Italian Lessons
“Una Gaffe su Ciampi all’apertura del G-7“ ran the headline in Corriere della Sera. Italy’s pro-Clinton “newspaper of record” went on to describe how the American President greeted Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the Italian prime minister, when they met at the Tokyo economic summit: “Good morning President Skahlfahroh,” apparently confusing the prime minister (the president of...
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People of a Different Stripe
Precisely when it first occurred to Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun to lay her traps for the United Daughters of the Confederacy and its iniquitous insignia containing the Confederate “Stars and Bars” we are not given to know, but certainly it was well before the senator, invariably described in the press as the “Senate’s first black...
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Puppets and Their Masters
A naked boy runs down a crowded Italian street, chased by an angry old man. Grabbing the boy by the back of the neck, the old man shouts: “Just wait till I get you back home.” The crowd quickly takes sides against the old man, and when the carabinieri arrive, they take him off to...
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Jesting With Pilate
Americans pretend to be shocked whenever one of their national celebrities gets caught out in a lie. Is it really so surprising that Michael Jordan should attempt to conceal his gambling or that Bill Clinton should hide his cochonnerie? My European friends—some of them highly moral and religious men—never tire of ridiculing us for our...