The Supreme Court decided on June 26 to allow key parts of the Trump administration’s “travel ban” to go into effect temporarily. This was an unexpected victory for the President—and for common sense. Until the Court hears the full case in October, the administration will be able to bar travelers from six majority-Muslim countries who...
Category: Columns
Post
Wonders
Wonder Woman Produced by D.C. Entertainment Directed by Patty Jenkins Screenplay by Allen Heinberg Distributed by Warner Brothers Silence Produced by Cappa Defina Productions Directed by Martin Scorsese Screenplay by Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks, from the novel by Shusaku Endo Distributed by Paramount Pictures Wonder Woman is the first installment of what threatens to...
Post
Theresa May’s Anglo-Saxon Appeal
The British have a penchant for women leaders: Queens Elizabeth I & II, Victoria, Margaret Thatcher, and now Theresa May. The current Prime Minister isn’t just well liked: People seem to love her. Conservative MPs report that, when canvasing for the general election, voters stop them to say how proud they should be of her. ...
Post
Long Live the Queen!
Tempus Fugit. A recent ABC program on the death of Princess Diana reminded me that 20 years have gone by in a jiffy. She died August 31, 1997, following a car crash in the underpass of Place de l’Alma, and sent a nation, and the world, into mourning. Mind you, Princess Di is no longer...
Post
The Discarded Image
Mitch Landrieu and his growing coalition of disgruntled minorities and public-school-educated leftists give us an idea of where a divided, majority-ruled America is heading. In May, the mainstream media sacrificed valuable airtime and column space normally devoted to unsourced White House leaks to laud the New Orleans mayor’s effort to remove four monuments to the...
Post
The Wrong War
The assault on American history continues apace, with the further removal of Confederate monuments and symbols, and the expunging of anything relating to slavery or slaveholders. Mounting any defense against this cultural warfare has been next to impossible, because it would seem to demand justifying slavery. The same considerations prohibit any criticism of the Union...
Post
Economy and Independence
The president of the little village in West Michigan where I was born and raised (Spring Lake, population 2,360, sal-ute!) no longer wants to be village president. The obvious solution to this conundrum seems to have eluded the 84-year-old Joyce Verplank Hatton. Rather than resign the office, President Hatton has decided to take the road...
Post
Dance With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight
There was a notable convergence some decades ago, one that was noticed musically as two separate and distinct phenomena, but not as a convergence—or even as a conspiracy, or a rivalry. I never heard or saw any acknowledgment that two of the foremost instrumentalists in the world were fiddling around pretty much at the same...
Post
Wahhabism First
President Donald Trump started his first foreign tour on May 20 in Saudi Arabia. His two-day visit was punctuated by a series of embarrassingly poltroonish statements and gestures to his hosts. It culminated in a macabre sabre-rattling spectacle, the moral equivalent of tossing Zyklon B canisters into a Silesian compound in 1944. For his part,...
Post
The World as Imagination
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 Produced by Marvel Studios Directed and written by James Gunn Distributed by Walt Disney Studios The Lost City of Z Produced by Plan B Entertainment Directed and written by James Gray, based on David Grann’s book Distributed by Amazon Studios Mixed-race romance has become profitably au courant in popular...
Post
Adieu, France
Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election provides conclusive proof that no major European nation can save itself from demographic and cultural suicide through the electoral process. That outcome is not merely a victory for status quo politics, which millions of lower-middle-class French people prefer, but a triumph of the globalist establishment. Macron is...
Post
Down Here Among the Lilliputians
Kong: Skull Island Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts Screenplay by Dan Gilroy and Max Borenstein Moonlight Produced and distributed by A24 Directed by Barry Jenkins Screenplay by Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney Lion Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company Directed by Garth Davis Screenplay by Saroo Brierly from his...
Post
White Slaves
For many years I taught a U.S. history survey course. One of my lecture topics was American slavery. I made a real effort to put the peculiar institution into historical perspective. I noted that slavery was not something reserved for blacks here in America but was as old as man himself and recognized no racial...
Post
Smear Factor
As I’ve often written, The Spectator of London is not only the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world but the most elegant by far. (As, of course, is Chronicles.) I’ve been fortunate to have a column in the Speccie, as readers lovingly refer to it, for 40 years, a lifetime when it comes to journalism. ...
Post
Shameless Venus Goes to Prom
Randy teenage boys and hyphenated man-loathing feminists can agree on one thing: Prom is no place for patriarchal body-shaming. In this context, by body we must read cleavage, midriffs, thighs, and intergluteal clefts; and by shaming, we are to understand that the aforementioned have been unjustly deemed unfit for public viewing. To establish rules prohibiting...
Post
The Forgotten Secret War
This past December, the United States commemorated the 75th anniversary of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Most commentators rightly played down any conspiratorial suggestion that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately provoked that particular attack, although they agreed that the U.S. had been putting heavy diplomatic pressure on Japan in the months leading up to it. ...
Post
Rockford in the Springtime
I first entered Rockford the way that most people do when they’re coming from the east, taking the exit off I-90 onto East State Street, where the ramp T-bones into the Clock Tower Resort and Conference Center, now closed for good but then, in November 1995, still home to “the world’s most comprehensive collection of...
Post
Rambling Rose
As a literalist of the imagination, I have somehow supposed that the fall equinox on September 22 meant that according to astronomical rules, the roses would—with a clunk—stop blooming. But when last December, I saw many rosebushes still going at it even in a northern clime, I had to amend my faith in the lovely...
Post
The Bruckner Problem
There is a Bruckner Problem, yes, or there are even Bruckner Problems, but I think that the longer we consider these problems, the less problematical they are. The first problem is, where to start? We might suppose that Anton Bruckner (1824-96) is remarkable in the fascinating quality of his work. Hardly any composer except Mahler...
Post
Confronting Russophobia
There is a paranoid, hysterical quality to the public discourse on Russia and all things Russian in today’s America. The corporate media machine and its Deep State handlers have abdicated reason and common decency in favor of raw hate and fear-mongering. We have not seen anything like it before, even in the darkest days of...
Post
Racial Follies
Get Out Produced by Blumhouse Productions Written and directed by Jordan Peele Distributed by Universal Pictures Fences Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Denzel Washington Screenplay based on August Wilson’s play From what I had read in advance of seeing Get Out, a film written and directed by Jordan Peele, I had...
Post
The Vanity Press Remains
When, in 2009, a shady Russian oligarch and his foppish son took over London’s Evening Standard, the great British journalist Perry Worsthorne remarked, “I think it’s one more example that we are no more a serious nation.” Well, Perry, you were right, but I suspect even you didn’t see how silly British high society could...
Post
Big Macs, A-bombs, and Trump
William F. Buckley, Jr., spent his adult winter months in Rougemont, an alpine resort next to its chicer neighbor Gstaad, now the Mecca for the nouveau riche and vulgar. Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, however, the area was known for its music festival run by Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity writers like Buckley, my mentor,...
Post
If the Center Cannot Hold
The surprising triumph of Donald Trump has produced what can only be described as an extended temper tantrum by much of the American left, which fully expected a victory by Hillary Clinton to be followed by unending political dominance, as the white, Christian parts of America that generally vote Republican are gradually eclipsed demographically by...
Post
Power to the People!
The world is broken. There was a time when those words would have been considered unremarkable—a truism, even. Of course the world is broken: Our first parents, Adam and Eve, broke it. They did so by their sin. They had everything that any man or woman could ever reasonably want: a paradise to live in,...
Post
There Will Be Brahms
The subject of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D major (Op. 77) is fitting because we are talking about a work that is respected, which is one thing, but also loved, which is more. I had some special times with the Brahms Violin Concerto, even some special bad times, but I always come back to...
Post
A Coup Most Foul
We have seen coups of sorts in Washington before, not that anyone one calls them that. (Remember JFK, Nixon.) The one against Trump is of a different order of magnitude. It had been plotted by the Deep State even before he was inaugurated. Significant power nodes had always refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of this...
Post
Good Country People
Loving Produced by Raindog Films Directed and written by Jeff Nichols Distributed by Focus Features Hacksaw Ridge Produced by Cross Creek Pictures Directed by Mel Gibson Screenplay by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight Distributed by Summit Entertainment I first learned about miscegenation in 1958. A student in my high-school religion class asked our teacher, Father...
Post
Kit Carson
Though the mountain men were responsible for blazing nearly every trail to the Pacific Coast, discovering the natural wonders of the Trans-Mississippi West, and providing the muscle that fueled the fur trade—a major component of the American economy—few gained national recognition. An outstanding exception was Kit Carson. During the 1840’s and 50’s, John C. Frémont...
Post
Fakebook News
Who was it who said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime? The answer is a Frenchman by the name of Balzac, known in his time as a pretty good novelist. Well, is stealing an idea and making untold billions as a result a great crime? I suppose if it were my idea...
Post
K Is for Vendetta
And it came to pass that fear did grip all of the Swamp, from Foggy Bottom to DuPont Circle; and it did spread unto all of the region beyond the Potomac. For behold, Steve Bannon had come. Or, if we prefer not to use the familiar “Steve,” Stephen K. Bannon. The K must not be...
Post
A Man of the People
Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future’s sakes. Long-time readers of Chronicles may recall that this column bore a different rubric when it first appeared in the January 2001 issue. The initial mission of the Letter...
Post
Doktor Faust und Der Busoni
When they are so easily available for free, the opportunities on YouTube don’t leave much excuse for not taking advantage of them, even though in one particular case at least, the musical presentation is puzzling or unidiomatic or off-putting. But even there, gradually, the realization sets in—the realization that one hears the distillation of a...
Post
Dealing With China
A country’s rising economic strength tends to be reflected in her geopolitical clout. In the late 1880’s the United States overtook Great Britain as the world’s largest economy; a decade later, having defeated Spain, America took over the remnants of her empire. During the same period Germany’s massive economic growth enabled her to establish colonies...
Post
Shall We Dance?
La La Land Produced by Summit Entertainment Written and directed by Damien Chazelle Distributed by Liongate The Founder Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company Directed by John Lee Hancock Screenplay by Robert D. Siegel In last month’s issue, no less a cinematic authority than Taki pronounced La La Land delightful (“Beyond the Idiot Box,”...
Post
Friends, Busts, and Leverage
When historians someday study Anglo-American relations in the early 21st century, they will find a useful allegory in the saga of the Winston Churchill bust. This is the tale of a smallish sculpture by Jacob Epstein that has come to be a simulacra of the so-called Special Relationship. Tony Blair’s government presented the bust to...
Post
Virtue-Signalers in a Snit
Hollywood is in a snit. Hollywood is very angry. Hollywood is having a nervous breakdown. The Donald is in the White House, and Hollywood types cannot take it any more. Ditto for the New York Times and the TV networks, except for FOX. Madonna, that aging show-off whose vocabulary consists mainly of the F-word, said...
Post
Don’t Just Wound It: Kill It
The Department of Education must be destroyed. This holdover from the Carter administration costs us $80 billion per year, for which we have received in return a centralized educational bureaucracy beholden to wildly leftist teachers’ unions and the proliferation of ignorance. Cut this monstrous budget in half, and federal spending on education is still not...
Post
Why Fake News Matters
Fake news, as I discussed last month (“Faking It,” The Rockford Files), is a very real problem, though less for the reasons commonly given (the potentially destructive effects it may have on our “democracy”) and more for the fact that it both flows from a lack of concern for truth (and thus says something about...
Post
From This Culture, They Say You Are Leaving
The statistics that break down the consumption of music into types and groups are not very comforting to consider. But if we really want to know what the musical situation is, rather than to entertain a fantasy of what it ought to be, we would have to acknowledge the realities of musical art in our...
Post
Depoliticizing Intelligence
Knowing what is going on in the Hobbesian world of international politics is an essential function of the state apparatus. Detecting, assessing, and countering external threats, real and potential, helped the Byzantine empire survive a thousand years longer than its Western counterpart—well beyond its strictly geopolitical potential for endurance. Essential to its longevity was its...
Post
Marvelous Exhibitions
Nocturnal Animals Produced by Fade to Black Productions Directed and written by Tom Ford, based on Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan Distributed by Focus Features Doctor Strange Produced by Marvel and Disney Studios Directed and written by Scott Derrickson Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Erstwhile fashion designer turned film director Tom Ford seems to...
Post
Butch O’Hare
For years I taught a course on the history of World War II. I liked to ask the students if any of them had ever flown into Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Invariably, one or more in each class had. This was not surprising, because for the last 40 or 50 years O’Hare has been the...
Post
Beyond the Idiot Box
Call me old fashioned, and I will thank you for the compliment. Call me a fool for rosy nostalgia, and more thanks will be in order. Yes, Fred and Ginger are my favorite movie couple, and last year while recuperating from a broken leg, I watched four of their movies back to back, shown on...
Post
Dope Fiends of the West
Are addictions real? We talk as if they are. Many women say they are addicted to chocolate. Actor David Duchovny has been diagnosed with having a sex addiction. In the early 90’s, when crack was all the rage, one Christian pop singer encouraged young people to get off drugs and get “Addicted to Jesus.” What...
Post
Faking It
If one were to believe the mainstream media—and who doesn’t believe the mainstream media?—Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of these United States this month because over 60 million Americans are unable, and possibly unwilling, to tell the difference between true, objective reporting, filled with facts and designed only to help...
Post
Opera: Grand and Not So Grand
People sometimes seem to be prejudiced against opera for reasons that are arbitrarily unconvincing. These reasons turn out to be an antipathy based on class (opera is the province of the privileged), or antipathy resulting from sheer musical ignorance. (Trained voices don’t appeal to the contemporary ear.) These two specious reasons are important because the...
Post
Dismantling the Empire
History never repeats itself, but we may compare certain pivotal events in the quest for meaning and order in an apparently chaotic world. Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 and Donald Trump’s unexpected triumph in 2016 differ in countless, relatively insignificant ways, but they share one key characteristic: True Americans have risen against an anti-America of...
Post
Aliens: The Good and the Bad
Arrival 21 Laps Entertainment Directed by Denis Villeneuve Screenplay by Eric Heisserer based on Ted Chiang’s novella Distributed by Paramount Pictures Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Produced by Film4 and TriStar Pictures Directed by Ang Lee Screenplay by Jean-Christophe Castelli from Ben Fountain’s novel Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing When is the last time you...
Post
The Special Relationship, Redux?
Donald Trump is making the world go crazy. Here in Westminster, the political and media establishments are still convulsing following his election. And the angry shock at the top is rippling through British society. Most Brits remain convinced that, while Brexit and Trumpism were driven by similar forces, the two phenomena are not one and...