Category: Columns

While the genre of science fiction is hardly a century old, the roots of science fiction go deep into our history. Men have always told stories, and in telling them they have inevitably recast the world of their perceptions into something easier to grasp, more beautiful or more terrible than it really is. At bottom,...

The better future which Americans propose to build is nothing if not an idea which must in certain essential respects emancipate them from their past. American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation. On the whole, it is a past of which the loyal American has no...

Not so long ago anticommunist conservatives used to rail against the mirror fallacy, the leftist assumption that the Soviet Union could be studied in Western terms. If only we could strengthen the hand of the doves and “responsible” elements, we could keep the country from falling into the hands of the hard-liners and hawks—the Soviet...

George Bush chose a risky moment for launching his New World Order. World stock markets have reacted to the vicissitudes of war with all the stability of a manic-depressive who won’t take his medicine when he’s feeling up and doesn’t see the point of taking it when he’s down. The mere rumors of war were...

For this issue of Chronicles we have assembled the thing in and of itself, examples of Southern literature as it is here and now, a couple of appropriate poems and a work of fiction by one of the South’s finest writers, together with some good talk about contemporary letters in the South. I would rather...

I am a Cornishman, a Celt, born in the far southwest of England. Apart from the six years of the Second World War and my time as a student at a college of education, I have lived the whole of my life not only in the small market-town of Launceston, where I was born, but...

When I told friends that I was going to Italy to study the political situation there, the usual response was an amused puzzlement. Italian politics, I was informed, is like the Italian army: a grand opera performance of a comic opera plot. I am not so sure. Since the later Middle Ages, the Italians have...

We are often accused of looking on the dark side of everything. One editorialist even found it amusing that we occasionally compared contemporary America with the Byzantine Empire, as if such a comparison were not an insult to the Christian civilization of Constantinople. Despite our reputation, we like to think of ourselves as hardheaded optimists,...

Saddam Hussein’s little expedition into Kuwait has begun to take on the colors of a counter-crusade against European and American influence in the Middle East. As I write, in the second week of August, it is too early to predict the outcome of any of President Bush’s diplomatic and military initiatives. In general, he deserves...

A few years ago I found myself in the belly of the beast. To be more accurate, I was actually in the appendix of the beast, the Department of Education, giving a paper on curriculum reform. Secretary Bennett, who preceded me, spoke with his accustomed exuberance of the then current crisis in the humanities and...

Earth Day 1990. In front of the local library a few dozen people dressed up like Hollywood extras in a movie about the 60’s are “carrying signs that say hurray for our side,” while all over town there are alleys full of garbage, creeks choked with old mufflers and rusted appliances. In New York, Chicago,...

“To us your good Samaritan was a fool to risk the security of his family to help a stranger.” —Joey Tai in Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon It has been more than a year since we put out the March 1989 number of Chronicles, “A Nation of Immigrants,” in which it was suggested that...

Most Americans don’t know much about art, but they do know what they don’t like, namely blasphemy, pornography, and perversion. When they began to realize, in the course of 1989, that their own government, through the National Endowment for the Arts, was funding exhibitions of homosexual photographs and crucifixes in urine, they blew off enough...

Peace is busting out all over, and along with the prospect of peace comes the debate over how to spend the so-called “peace dividend,” supposing there is such a dividend. The administration doesn’t think there is, and Secretary of Defense Cheney has warned against spending the money saved on defense until it is in the...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Juvenal’s admonition to husbands has often been applied to government, but rarely with the full force of the original: “Go ahead and lock her up,” the Roman satirist warned, “but who will watch the watchmen themselves? She’s put on her guard and starts with them.” Once a large number of frail...

The doctrine of states’ rights has returned to the American political scene. Leftist and liberal governors have been dusting off the arguments of John C. Calhoun and echoing the speeches of Strom Thurmond in preparation for their defiance of the national government. The battle is being fought on several grounds. In Massachusetts, the fight is...

The dilapidation of the Soviet Empire at the end of 1989 became the minor premise of the argument that man’s dreams of peace and global unity are finally about to be realized at the end of the second millennium. The peaceful crusade of East Germans across the border has convinced otherwise sober men that democracy’s...

Shortly after the election of 1988 one grand old man of the Republican Party told me he thought Mr. Bush could do a creditable job so long as his administration faced no major crises. The very minor crisis of the abortive coup in Panama was the first serious test of this thesis, and it would...

Or Now That Poetry Is Dead, I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Drink A new battle of the books is in progress. This time, the lines are not being drawn between modern and ancient but between the present and the recent past, and the antagonists are not Homer against Milton or Aristotle vs. Bacon,...

Even in mid-September you cannot go comfortably by day into the deserts of southeastern Utah. Together the late Edward Abbey and I rented horses and rode into the La Sal mountains, following what began as a dirt road and ended as a trail at an elevation of approximately 10,500 feet. From the mountain pass, we...

In recent months both San Francisco and New York have been the scene of triumphs for the homosexual rights movement’s efforts to legitimate single-sex liaisons. . . . Newsweek‘s Eleanor Clift, appearing on The McLaughlin Group, summed up the cases as evidence that in the 1980’s the American people were redefining the family. The American...

In the 1950’s any real American boy knew that whatever he wanted to be when he grew up, it was not an underemployed television father like Ward Cleaver or Ozzie Nelson. Our fictional heroes were from another time. They were the cowboys, frontiersmen, and pioneers who had taken risks that seemed inconceivable to a generation...

One man, one vote. It seems such an obvious, such a simple principle. What can possibly hinder its implementation in South Africa, where blacks are barred from the exercise of citizenship rights, or Israel, where West Bank Palestinian children take to the streets demanding self-government and civil rights, or New York City, where the Board...

or Why the Best Training for a Novelist in These Last Years of the 20th Century is an Internship at Bellevue or Cook County Hospital, and How This Training Best Prepares Him for Diagnosing T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ But let us speak of vocations. What one ends up doing with one’s life is surely one...

The Supreme Court’s recent decision to review a Missouri abortion case has raised the spirits of the pro-life movement. In his appeal, Missouri’s attorney general asked the Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade, the landmark civil rights decision that made pregnant women and their physicians sole arbiters over who is born and who is not...