Category: Columns

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Slicing and Twisting

No matter how many curses should be heaped on the head of Thurgood Marshall, recently retired from some 24 years of slicing and twisting the raw meat of the Constitution into whatever ideological pastry suited his appetite of the moment, even his shrillest foes have to acknowledge Mr. Marshall’s eminence in the legal and judicial...

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America, From Republic to Ant Farm

In July I took my four children back to the South Carolina village in which they had spent their earliest years. The most frequent topics of conversation were still, in order, Hurricane Hugo and its aftermath, a public school controversy that appeared to pit blacks against whites but really concerned the ambitions of a New...

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A Defunct Republic

If the American Republic is defunct, and if most Americans no longer subscribe to the classical republicanism that defined the Republic as its public orthodoxy, what is the principal issue of American politics? Ever since the Progressive Era, the issue that has divided Americans into the two political and ideological camps of “right” and “left”...

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Not Really a Republic

Just because it looks like a Republic and quacks like a Republic doesn’t mean it’s really a Republic. In ancient Rome, after Julius and Augustus Caesar got through with the civil wars, proscriptions, and purges that spelled death to the remains of the old Roman nobility, the state still looked and quacked like the republic...

Science Fictions
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Science Fictions

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,...

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Not What People Expect

Lamar Alexander is not what most people expect to emerge from the hills of Tennessee, but in the New World Order, the state that produced Sergeant York, Jack Daniels, the Grand Ole Opry, and the Great Dayton Monkey Trial retains about as much cultural singularity as an enterprise zone in Detroit. Indeed, that’s pretty much...

The Broken Promise of American Life
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The Broken Promise of American Life

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...

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Define “Imperialism”

Lewis Namier liked to tell the story of an English schoolboy who was asked to define “imperialism” on an examination paper. “Imperialism,” the budding proconsul wrote, “is learning how to get along with one’s social inferiors.” In the Edwardian twilight of the British Empire, that answer might have sufficed to win a scholarship to Balliol,...

America Through the Looking Glass
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America Through the Looking Glass

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...

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The New Fusionism

“In the government of Virginia,” said John Randolph in 1830, “we can’t take a step without breaking our shins over some Federal obstacle.” Randolph’s metaphor was a minor exaggeration 160 years ago; today, it would be a gross understatement, because today that federal obstacle has been erected so high, so deep, so strong, that we...

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Preparing for the Presidential Games

The presidential games of 1992 are well more than a year away, but wouldbe Republican gladiators are already measuring George Bush for a quick thrust in the belly. Their plans may be premature. Though the President came close to wrecking his party by breaking his promise against new taxes and may yet make a fool...

Surviving in the New World Order
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Surviving in the New World Order

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...

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The Bit Between Their Teeth

Despite last summer’s brassy pronouncements that the owl had sung her watchsong on the towers of Capitol Hill, the oligarchs of Congress bit the reins in their teeth and lashed their mounts full into the maelstrom of constituents disgusted with pay-raises, privileges, perversion, and pretension. Some 96 percent of the incumbents managed to ride out...

Anarchy and Family in the Southern Tradition
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Anarchy and Family in the Southern Tradition

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...

What Gift?
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What Gift?

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...

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Centuries of Delusion

After centuries of delusion that white people ever accomplished anything worth doing, Euro-Americans are finally learning to grapple with just how worthless they really are. Last November, a conference of the Brahmins of “Afrocentrism” in Atlanta devoted all of a weekend to expounding the much-trumpeted insights that it was really Africans who built the pyramids,...

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A Bad Moon on the Rise

There’s a bad moon on the rise, and as 1990 drew to a close, the American ruling class began to huddle in its tents to meet the coming storm. When ex-Klansman David Duke seized 44 percent of the vote in Louisiana’s senatorial election last October, the howling of the political cyclone could be heard even...

Divorce Italian Style
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Divorce Italian Style

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...

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Tax-Supported Amphibious Landings

Until the discovery in the spring of 1989 that the National Endowment for the Arts was conducting tax-supported amphibious landings on the farther shores of anatomy, physiology, and abnormal psychology, probably few Americans had ever heard of the relatively obscure agency that presides over the floating wreckage of the American arts. Founded in 1965 and...

The Loser in a Lawn Chair
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The Loser in a Lawn Chair

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,...

Further Reflections on Violence
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Further Reflections on Violence

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...

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The Bogeyman Is Still Out There

“And the bogeyman will get ya, if ya don’t watch out,” sang James Whitcomb Riley in one of his most popular and most insipid poems. The bogeyman is still out there, it seems. Sometimes he’s Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi; sometimes Syria’s Hafez Assad, or Idi Amin, Yassir Arafat, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Abu Nidal, or any of...

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A Twinkle in the Brain

Two years after George Bush moved downtown to the White House, the suspicion is beginning to twinkle in the brains of his conservative followers that the President is not one of them after all. What tipped them off to this shattering truth was their leader’s nonchalant decision last summer to support a tax increase. But...

Revolution and Tradition in the Humanities Curriculum
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Revolution and Tradition in the Humanities Curriculum

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...

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Desperate Pretense

After two years of desperate pretense that the Bush administration is but the long afternoon of the Reagan era, many of Mr. Bush’s conservative supporters now begin to suspect that morning in America is fast lurching toward chaos and old night. The President’s apparent willingness to consider tax increases, despite his best-known campaign promise, and...

Short Views on Earth Day
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Short Views on Earth Day

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,...

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A New Civilization

One of the unmistakable signs that a new civilization is about to leap forth from the crumbling cocoon of an old is the transformation in the meaning of traditional holidays. When a rising Christian elite seized political and cultural power in the late Roman Empire, it lost no time in turning the old Roman Saturnalia...

A Not So Wonderful Life
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A Not So Wonderful Life

“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...

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Ounces of Flesh

On the same day last year that the Supreme Court sliced a few ounces of flesh out of its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, it also carved up an American tradition governing the public observance of Christmas. In the case of Allegheny v. ACLU, the Court held that Allegheny County in Pennsylvania could...

The Art of Revolution
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The Art of Revolution

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...

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February, Otherwise Known As “Black History Month”

“Black History Month,” sometimes called “February,” used to be about as exciting as National Jogging Week, but this year it stood up and pranced. First, executives at CBS gave the bounce to commentator Andy Rooney to punish him for unkind remarks he may or may not have uttered about the African-American gene pool. Then, Senator...

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Disintegrating

In the space of a few months in 1989, the Soviet imperium in Eastern Europe began to disintegrate like a soda cracker in salt water, and even within the U.S.S.R. itself, long dormant national, ethnic, and religious passions began to sputter and whine. The Beriin Wall was turned into a collection of pet rocks, and...

Be Angry at the Sun
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Be Angry at the Sun

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...

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Hardly an Accident

It is hardly an accident that the decomposition of the American nation and its culture is paralleled by the decomposition of the American middle class. In the 19th century, nationality and the middle classes were born together as Siamese twins, and their enemies understood their linkage and tried their best to strangle them in their...

Science, Wisdom, and Moral Judgment
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Science, Wisdom, and Moral Judgment

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...

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A Threat to Integrity

Like Satan in Dante’s Inferno, the forces threatening the integrity of the American nation and its culture have three faces. The “global economy” and political one-world.ism jeopardize the historic character, independence, and the very sovereignty of the United States. The third threat, the mass immigration that this country has endured for the last fifteen years...

Government of the People
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Government of the People

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...

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A Major Threat to American Identity

Economic globalism, beloved of many on the contemporary right, may be the major threat to the national and cultural identity of American civilization in the coming decades, but its logical counterpart is the political globalism, long beloved of the left, that marches under the banner of “one world.” As the economic dependence of the United...

Peace on Earth Among Men of Good Will
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Peace on Earth Among Men of Good Will

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...

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Zippity-Doo-Dah Rhetoric

Despite the zippity-doo-dah rhetoric that many conservatives have spouted for the last decade, the United States in the 1990’s will encounter challenges that neither the “right” nor the “left” is prepared to recognize, much less meet. The challenges go far beyond the “relative decline” that Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers...

Banana Republicans
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Banana Republicans

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...

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Nationalism Looking Pretty Good

If conservatives carried revolvers, they’d probably reach for them at the sound of the word “nationalism.” Perhaps it’s just as well they don’t carry revolvers, since nationalism usually makes its appearance armed with considerably bigger guns. In the Europe of Metternich and Castlereagh, nationalism was the vehicle for the revolutionary destruction of dynastic and aristocratic...

Nunc Est Bibendum
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Nunc Est Bibendum

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,...

The Cow in the Trail
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The Cow in the Trail

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...

A Prayer for My Daughters
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A Prayer for My Daughters

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...

Rock and Roll Never Forgets
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Rock and Roll Never Forgets

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...

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Second Thoughts

These days everyone is having second thoughts—about Vietnam and the 60’s, about American history, about what it means to be a liberal and what it means to be a conservative. Rather than be left out of the rewrite, I too have been having second thoughts about what I did and did not do some 20...

The Legacy of 1789
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The Legacy of 1789

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...

Physician as Novelist
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Physician as Novelist

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...

Life and Death in a House Divided
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Life and Death in a House Divided

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...