Category: Perspective

Modern Americans are going to live forever.  We must believe that; otherwise we would not rise up in spontaneous outrage whenever a stuck accelerator causes a car to crash or a surgical procedure goes awry.  Science and technology have made our world not only foolproof but death-proof, or at least they would have, were it...

Sometimes I like to remind myself of what a nobody I am.  It does not take much to trigger these fits of humility.  A glance in the mirror or at the ever-expanding bulge in my vest is usually enough to call to mind at least two deadly sins that have tempted me all too often. ...

I have seen a great deal of your government since I came to India.  Your forts, your arsenals, your ships, all are admirable.  I have been down to Calcutta, and have been astonished with your wealth, your palaces, your marts, and your mint; but to me the most wonderful thing of all is that so...

It was about 3 p.m. on October 26, 1881, as Tombstone’s town marshal, Virgil Earp (also a deputy U.S. marshal), his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, and the Earps’ eccentric friend Dr. John H. Holliday confronted Isaac and William Clanton and Thomas and Robert Findley McLaury near the O.K. Corral.  After 30 seconds of firing, Morgan...

Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards.  For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them . ....

I did not expect to like the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, which is why I had never bothered to go up to Montmartre.  The basilica was commissioned by Catholics who had survived the Paris Commune of 1870-71, when churches were destroyed and the faithful were persecuted.  Even as the revolution was sputtering out, the communists...

Francis Parkman concluded his monumental account of France and England in North America with the Peace of Paris of 1763, by which France ceded Quebec, once and for all, to the British Empire.  In an uncharacteristically smug observation on the aftermath, Parkman described the French Canadians as “a people bereft of every vestige of civil...

We were in Athens, near the end of July, having dinner with some Greek friends at Attikos, a popular rooftop restaurant with a view of the Parthenon.  Like most conservatives, our friends are somewhat pessimistic about what the future holds for their country, and from their description it seems to me that as the left...

When Jefferson Davis was a boy, he told his father that he did not wish to go to school.  The Yankee schoolmaster, although a kindly man, demanded a great deal of memory work and threatened to punish young Jeff for his failure.  His father took the declaration in stride and calmly explained to his son,...

Conservative political strategists are like the military strategists they would like to emulate: They are always fighting the last war.  For how many years, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, did conservatives continue to rail against the communist menace?  Marxism, and not only the virulent Leninist strain adopted by the Bolsheviks, had once posed a...

“Say, I guess America is just about the best country that has ever existed in the history of mankind.” I have been hearing this assertion all my life and never fully understood what is intended, unless it is merely one of those ahems that we Americans inject into a conversation when we have nothing to...

It is like a science-fiction movie from the 1950’s.  Mysterious radiation from outer space takes over the brains of Asian men in America, turning them into moral zombies that go on killing sprees: a Buddhist in Texas who tried to beat the demons out of his three-year-old son who had eaten meat; a discharged IBM...

“The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.”  I first heard this wise insight into the American way of life from Sam Ervin, who was, as I have since learned, quoting John Ciardi.  I should not be surprised: Poets always get to the heart of the matter a...

“Libero Ingresso” says the little sign on the doors of an Italian shop.  English speakers who know enough Italian to translate the words, Free Entrance, sometimes wonder if there was a time when Italian shopkeepers charged customers an admission fee, to be refunded, perhaps, if a purchase was made.  It is just the sort of...

Jon Stewart: “You write that marriage is the bedrock of our society.  Why would you not want more couples to buy into the stability of marriage?”   Mike Huckabee: “Marriage still means one man one woman life relationship.  I think people have a right to live any way they want to, but even anatomically ....

“Now he belongs to the ages,” Edwin Stanton is supposed to have said, when he learned of President Lincoln’s death.  In a trivial sense at least, Stanton was obviously correct.  We have Lincoln’s face on the five-dollar bill—a bill that used to be worth more than a Happy Meal, before Lincoln’s disciples degraded the currency—and...

These days bipolarism appears to be the “in” childhood malady touted by leftist psychologists, who previously promoted ADHD to explain away the disturbed behavior exhibited by postmodern children and adolescents.  The list of problems is long: antisocial behavior, poor performance in school, sexual promiscuity; depression and suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism; violence and random acts...

Like many children growing up in the 1950’s, he looked forward to Halloween even more than to Christmas.  It was, admittedly, a difficult choice, because at Halloween, all he got was candy or a disappointing piece of fruit, while Christmas was a bigger bonanza even than his birthday.  Nonetheless, after the anticipations of Christmas Eve...

This month, we shall have an answer to an all-important question: Which arm of our bipartisan party state will occupy the White House for the next four years?  This is an issue second in importance only to such urgent American questions as “When will Britney Spears be allowed to see her kids?”  “How much weight...

Barack Obama has a problem, and if it were not for this one problem, he would easily be elected president.  As it is, because of this problem, the impossible John Mc­Cain actually has a chance.  The problem is white people.  Yes, it is true that the majority of Obama supporters are white people, but most...

An eminent British statesman once confessed to Horace Walpole that he had learned all he knew of the Wars of the Roses from reading Shakespeare’s histories.  I do not recall who the statesman was, and I am only guessing that Walpole is the source of the anecdote.  As is the case of most of what...

It was about 1965, in Jimmy Dengate’s “club” in Charleston, when I got my first clue to what the 50’s had been all about.  I met an unusual sportswriter.  Let us call him Jack, if only because it was his real name.  Jack was unusual, because he could write decent prose, knew something about sports,...

“He [John McCain] did everything that we asked of him, including arming the KLA.” —Albanian lobbyist Joe DioGuardi When I hear the word Belgrade pronounced, I can almost smell the soft coal smoke tainting the chilly air of early spring.  Waking in the Palace Hotel on Toplicin Venac, the slightly sour smell has filled the...

“This used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.” When people of a certain age and experience begin to think about when and how America went wrong, they almost inevitably hear echoes of George Hanson’s little sermon, delivered by Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider.  An ACLU...

After the recent shootings on the campus of Northern Illinois University, network-news programs were filled with helpful proposals for dealing with the growing problem of school violence.  The suggestions were the predictably inane and irrelevant products of post-Christianity’s impoverished imagination: more counseling for shocked and grieving students, a university warning system complete with a database...

How beastly the bourgeois is, Especially the male of the species D.H. Lawrence’s lines are still quoted, though most often by writers who know nothing else of his poetry.  It is taken for granted that Lawrence was right to contemn the “middle-class values” of the whited sepulchers who pretend to virtues and tastes they do...

The long campaign of 2007-08, already sputtering out in fizzled squibs, childish ploys, and pointless personal recriminations, has offered few of the moments of drama or high comedy that Americans have rightly come to expect of our political candidates.  The debates have been as drab as Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits, as wooden as Barack Obama’s imitation...

The issue of Kosovo, which has been simmering since the United States waged a war of unprovoked and unjustifiable aggression against the former Yugoslavia, is boiling over.  While Serbian “public opinion” is said to be more interested in economic questions, the resentment against the international community is real.  As one senior advisor to Prime Minister...

After wearing out the patience of television viewers over an entire year of premature campaigning, the two political parties will soon be informing us of their choices.  Will the presidential election of 2008 really come down to a contest between two leftist anti-Christian senators representing New York?  Or will Al Gore, even more bloated with...

The Illinois legislature recently overrode Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto of what the newspapers are describing as mandatory-school-prayer legislation.  Predictably, the state’s editorial pages are filled with denunciations of this arbitrary attempt to impose religion on the helpless children of Illinois, but in fact, the new law, requiring a minute of silence at the beginning of...

The summer of 2007 was nearly intolerable here in Northern Illinois.  Except for a glorious week in July when the sun, shining bright in the clear sky, never warmed our city to above 80 degrees, the days were an unpleasant mix of heat and humidity, punctuated by a few cool stretches drowned in torrential rains...

Nicholas Chiaroscuro is one of the most important men in American politics.  Not that he is a politician.  Mr. Chiaroscuro does not aspire to the lofty position of political puppets whose only qualifications are an insipid face, a case of hair spray, and an infinite capacity for self-gratification.  Chiaroscuro looks upon such creatures much as...

My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education.  It was all time wasted, less profitable than time wasted on politics.  Politicians, to their credit, know that it...

In a spurt of avuncular generosity, I handed the young man a cigar.  It was a pretty good smoke, maybe a Romeo y Julieta or a Maria Mancini I had bought for half-price.  (I buy all my cigars on sale or do not buy them at all.)  The polite young man thanked me, clipped the...

It was the second night of RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults), and Ted, the amateur catechist in charge of the class, was on a roll.  The students were an odd lot of fallen-away Catholics, disgruntled Protestants who wanted to become Catholics, and men and women engaged to Catholics who objected to mixed marriages. ...

We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth.  In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim.  Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not...

Conservatives in the 21st century lead subterranean lives, taking refuge in their obscurity and finding comfort only in the virtual memories of better times, memories all too often implanted from misleading books and films.  Like aristocratic pagans in the afterglow of the Roman Empire, they are a despised minority who fight symbolic battles.  In 382,...

Sir Elton John would like to “ban religion completely” because it stirs up “hatred toward gay people.”  Like so many giants of the entertainment industry, Elton John probably does not hate religion per se but only Christianity.  Christophobia is the religion of Hollywood.  Ask Barbra Streisand; ask the top brass at Disney or DreamWorks. The...

The day after Christmas 2006, the U.S.-military death toll in Iraq overtook and then surpassed the total number of Americans killed on September 11, 2001.  Some Democrats, even before the symbolic number was reached, were calling for a withdrawal, either immediate or gradual, of U.S. forces.  President Bush, although he had abandoned his signature tune...

Politics is like the weather: No matter how blue in the face we talk ourselves, no matter how many virgins we sacrifice to Odin, our leaders do not improve, and the drought continues.  The fates who determine the destinies of nations are no more obedient to our words than the little gods of wind and...

In the year 2000, many conservatives, with or without holding their noses, turned out to vote for George W. Bush.  One of the Republicans’ strongest selling points during the campaign was Governor Bush’s oft-repeated declaration that his administration would not engage in nation-building experiments.  After eight years of President Clinton’s busybodying in the Balkans, where...

No one on the planet, by now, has not heard of the violence that greeted Pope Benedict’s references to Emperor Manuel II and his reflections on Islam.  Manuel, invariably (and unfairly) described as “obscure” or “forgotten,” lived in one of those interesting ages of the world that teach lessons to those who are not blind...

America has not been a nation for well over a century.  She is more like an Indian stew: Never taken off the fire, the mess of wild carrots and fish is gradually transformed by the daily addition of squirrels and squash, birds and deer, and the odd bit of human body.  By the end of...

When George Bernard Shaw decided to devote himself to the destruction of civilization (or, as he would have preferred to call it, the cause of socialism), he spent years studying political economy.  As Chesterton put it in a book devoted to his longtime friend, Here was a man who could have enjoyed art among the...

Faculty parties are excruciating experiences—bad food and worse conversation.  It has been many decades since American professors were scholars or scientists who could take an intelligent interest in a wide range of subjects, but they doggedly persist in repeating the opinions they have picked up like so much lint. Younger professors are perhaps the worst...

The troubles of youth have long been a staple of popular fiction.  In 19th-century fiction, wellborn young men borrowed against their future inheritance in order to pay for the wine, women, and song that red-blooded young men have always pursued.  In the mid-20th century, readers were titillated by tales of urban ethnic kids—Irish, Jewish, black—whose...

This past spring, while Congress was engaging in its usual mock debate about tightening immigration, hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans took their case to the streets.  In the first round of demonstrations, Chicanos, waving Mexican flags, demanded rights for illegals and declared that all those who favored enforcing the law were racists. We all heard...

George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency on a pledge not to engage in the nation-building experiments that characterized the Clinton years, and, like every other president of the 20th century, he did not simply break his major promises: He did exactly the opposite.  Naturally, his administration has plenty of excuses.  Failing to discover those...

Suppose a wife is dying or has been lying for years in a coma: Who has ultimate authority to decide what medical treatments will be used to prolong or not to prolong her life?  Suppose a child of divorced parents is taken out of the country by his mother, who then dies, leaving the child...

Some 45 years ago, I was sitting in Washington Park, a quiet refuge in downtown Charleston defined by Broad, Meeting, and Chalmers Streets. The park was my favorite place to read and to engage in what was then every young man’s hobby: brooding about girls. Sitting there, I be- came aware of an annoying presence—...