Category: Perspective

The Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London has disclosed one of America’s dirtiest secrets: In this country founded, so we are told repeatedly, on the liberal trinity of rights to life, liberty, and property, our claims to property are as tenuous as the liberty of Christian parents with children in public...

In one of his earliest essays, Walker Percy expounded a theory of “Metaphor as Mistake,” and it is true that many insights, not all of them metaphorical, can arise from misunderstanding or, as happens to me more frequently these days, mishearing what someone has said.  A psychiatrist friend, back about 1970, told me of a...

“Cincinnati is no mean city,” one of my Greek professors used to say when he wanted to illustrate the use of litotes.  I lived not too far north of Cincinnati for three years and spent a good deal of time in what was and is one of the few cities of the Midwest to survive...

“O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth stand in awe of him.” – Psalm 96:9 The psalmists never tired of praising the beauty and majesty of the Lord’s house. Solomon was so eager to build a fitting temple that he traded a good part of Galilee to Hiram of...

What does it mean to be an “agrarian”?  In reading Southern literary journals, I get the impression that the “agrarians” were an isolated group of writers who, nostalgic for the preindustrial South, celebrated in prose and verse the bygone beauties of rustic life.  In this sense, they were like the early Romantics, and their movement,...

Tony Blair is mad—really mad.  Nasty people keep blowing up things in his London, and he is going to do something about it.  At a press conference in late July, he told the world that he wants to make it illegal for British subjects to leave Britain for advanced terrorist training in Pakistan.  The hidden...

Once upon a time, I decided to learn Japanese.  I had none of the usual practical reasons: no business interests that would take me to Japan nor even an academic project comparing Noh plays with Attic tragedy.  I knew next to nothing of Japan, though as a child, my imagination had been stirred by the...

A republican government is an exercise in human optimism, and patriotic republicans must engage in an unremitting struggle against that human entropy we used to know as Original Sin.  Any American citizen today can quote, or at least dimly recall, Washington’s declarative challenge in his Farewell Address: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead...

We Americans are in a serious quandary.  Our national mythology—like the mythologies of most nations—requires us to pay tribute to the heroes of the past.  Once upon a time, Fourth of July speeches routinely invoked the bravery of George Washington and his men, their sufferings at Valley Forge, and their surprise crossing of the Delaware. ...

Americans, it has been observed, have little or no strategic sense.  Strategy, as any schoolboy used to know, comes from a Greek word meaning “generalship” in the broad sense of the art of “projecting and directing” (OED) a campaign as opposed to the tactical abilities needed to marshal men on the battlefield.  The American can-do...

When Ariel Sharon, facing strong international pressure, proposed a withdrawal of settlements from Gaza, the settlers’ response was predictably hostile.  For some, the motive is predominantly economic—the settlements represent affordable housing; for others, nationalist politics is the driving force: Israel, they say, is Israel, and no part should be subtracted. These arguments can be countered...

Pace W.B. Yeats, mere anarchy is not loosed upon the world.  What we enjoy in this country, and to a large extent in most other Western nations, is a bit more complicated than mere anarchy.  It is, in fact, the unique achievement of the political genius of the modern era: what, in 1992, I called...

The doping scandals that plague professional and “amateur” sports have done little to shake the enthusiasm of fans and sportswriters for their heroes.  Fans still flock to the stadiums and spend their weekends watching NBA basketball games, NASCAR races, and even (if ABC is to be believed) AFL football exhibitions.  As a child, I once...

The “War on Terror,” as the years roll by, looks more like a Maginot Line than like a Blitzkrieg. Instead of hunting down terrorists or expelling Islamic cells from the United States, President Bush has chosen to attack the rogue states of Afghanistan and Iraq.  Instead of targeting Islam itself as the source of anti-American...

The reelection of George W. Bush has confirmed the leftist takeover of the Republican Party.  While conservative Christians turned out in strength to defeat the party of “gay marriage,” Richard Perle & Assoc. remains in charge of foreign policy, and Karl Rove and Arlen Specter will prevent any action on the moral agenda.  Most movement...

In one of Douglas Adams’ very silly books, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the egocentric two-headed president of the universe, is condemned to undergo the ordeal of the Total Perspective Vortex.  It is an excruciating form of torture that exposes the criminal to a sense of the infinite size of the universe and his own small place in...

Many Americans are so disappointed with the Bush administration that they are tempted to vote for John Kerry.  Some Democrats who spent the past 80 years waiting for the Revolution to blow over may think theirs is still the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” as it was dubbed in 1884, but, by the 1960’s,...

We Americans pride ourselves on being a nation of rootless individuals, cut off from the history that chained Old Europe to a cycle of wars and revolutions and bound to one another not by ties of blood and soil but only by the bloodless abstraction of self-evident truths.  Rooted in no one place, our corporate...

As a young college student, I accepted implicitly all the goals of the Civil Rights revolution.  I believed firmly that schools should be integrated, even though the nearest thing to integration I had ever experienced was going to school with a part-Ojibwe in Superior, Wisconsin, a lily-white town in which black people were not allowed...

Why are the phrases “honest journalist” and “free press” so often greeted with a snicker?  Of course, everyone exempts his own columnist or talking head from the general condemnation, but most Americans also exempt their own congressman from the universal condemnation of Congress as a body made up of toadies and swindlers.  To see the...

Tonight, dear friends, is the eve of the Feast of Albertus Magnus.  “Who he?” would be the response of most people who have gone to school since the end of World War II.  Names like Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, Cicero and Cato, Alfred the Great and the Venerable Bede, while they may echo distantly...

The American Revolution, as all Americans are taught, began as a rebellion against unfair taxation; in the United States today, however, some 230 years after James Otis protested the Stamp Act, unimaginably higher taxes are imposed on the American people and collected by means that would have seemed tyrannical to George III.  Britain had no...

My father believed in progress almost to the end of his life, when changing his mind would scarcely have made any difference.  Like most liberals, he regarded traditional institutions as so many barriers to man’s continued improvement, and yet, like most good men who are liberals, his head was contradicted by his heart: He despised...

December can be a difficult month for American Christians, forced to look on passively as their sacred holy days are turned into a generic “holiday season.”  The First Sunday in Advent has been replaced by “Black Friday,” the day on which retailers begin to turn a profit on holiday sales; and the end of the...

The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless.  Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international...

American cities rot from the center like an old oak tree: Empty and desolate within, they are kept from dying only by the life that surges just beneath the surface of the peripheral bark.  Here in Rockford, the flight to the suburbs is commonly blamed on the aging buildings and the unpleasantness of life in...

American Christians love to deceive themselves.  They close their eyes and pretend that the government’s war against their religion is a temporary aberration; they insist—against all the evidence—that Abraham Lincoln was a Christian; and, when some federal judge dictates a decree stripping the town square of its cross and crèche or tearing down the Ten...

“The trowel in hand and the gun rather easy in the holster” —Nehemiah, according to T.S. Eliot “Say you got two Gucci jackets, you hock one and you get yourself a gat.” —The “Bad” News Bible Jesus, contemplating His departure from this world, instructed His disciples to arm themselves, and, ever since, Christians enrolled in...

The modern age has been a 500-year revolution against Aristotle.  Bacon and Galileo assailed his authority in the natural sciences; neoplatonists rejected his metaphysics in favor of a false mysticism that was little better than black magic; Epicureans, thrilled with the insights of the rediscovered poem of Lucretius, preferred hedonism and materialism to Aristotle’s morality...

In the two years since Muslim terrorists murdered over 3,000 of our citizens on September 11, Americans have been taking one side or the other in the debate between the partisans of security and public order, led by Attorney General John Ash-croft, and the partisans of free speech, championed by the ACLU and other groups...

The French Revolution was a cancer that metastasized and spread through Western societies, weakening them to the point of collapse.  Even the European and American right did not escape being contaminated by the forces they struggled against, and, certainly, by the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly difficult to frame a conservative argument...

“You shall have life and that abundantly.” What did Jesus’ followers make of this bold promise?  He had shown them that he could cure the diseases that afflict both body and mind, and, in bringing Lazarus back from the dead, He lifted the veil to reveal a part of the mystery of His own being. ...

The U.S. Supreme Court is like one of those dinosaur reconstructions at which children gape when they are taken to a museum.  Not only is the Court today an imaginative reconstruction of something that no longer actually exists, it is so huge an institution that few Americans are able to take it in all at...

In 1793, the Jacobins, surfing the wave of Parisian mob violence, intimidated their less resolute colleagues into eliminating both the principle of monarchy and the existence of its politically superfluous incarnation, Louis XVI.  Not content with killing a living king and pronouncing a death sentence in absentia on all the princes of the blood who...

In the first year of Cyrus the king the same Cyrus the king made a decree concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, Let the house be builded, the place they offered sacrifices, and let the foundations thereof be strongly laid. Mesopotamia was the cradle of empires, but it was also their grave, as the...

As the U.S. government prepared to go to war with Iraq, the Bush administration worked simultaneously on two strategies to justify its position.  Making its case to the U.N. Security Council, American representatives stressed the need for a multinational front against terrorism and called for a new, more vigorous resolution against Iraq’s “weapons of mass...

American conservatives used to be fond of saying that the United States have entered a decadent period something like that of the Roman Empire.  Since American conservatives do not read history, they were never very clear on the period they had in mind, but let us assume they mean the third century, when the empire...

A new Dark Age is already upon us, and perhaps we might learn a few lessons from the last one.  It was a time when the arts of civilization were dimly recalled in fairy tales, when Krum the Bulgar khan gilded a Roman emperor’s skull and used it as a drinking goblet, when the careful...

September 11, 2001, has joined the short list of dates—December 7, 1941; November 22, 1963—that every American is supposed to remember what he was doing when he heard the news.  I learned of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center as I was sitting on my screened porch, listening to the newsless propaganda...

It was a muggy day in late July, and I had gone to the back of the church to rest on crutches and take some pressure off my sprained ankle.  Taking advantage of my condition to stand in the way of one of the church’s too-few fans, I noticed a woman feeding candy to her...

And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.  Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you. —Luke 22:19-20 These familiar...

It was a late night in the small-town pizzeria, and the owners were sitting at our table drinking the Antinori Chianti riserva that was “too sour” for the local Swedes, who prefer Lambrusco on the rocks when they are not drinking Miller Lite.  The husband had come from Italy as a child, but his wife...

Siena is almost entirely a city of the later Middle Ages.  The days of glory—artistic as well as political—were the 13th and 14th centuries, and by the time the city was absorbed by the Medici empire in 1552, it was already a place of memories, whose people were ridiculed by the Florentines (in Dante’s phrase)...

Pat Buchanan’s threnody on The Death of the West has upset Mr. Buchanan’s conservative enemies, who cannot forgive him for violating the GOP’s famous 11th Commandment—not “Thou shalt not speak ill of other Republicans,” but “Thou shalt not bite the hand that feeds us.”  No one can actually dispute Buchanan’s main thesis: that European America...

If drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” address was a remarkable performance in many ways: It simultaneously marked the zenith of American triumphalism and the nadir, not only...

The basic principle of judo, so I have been told, is to use your enemy’s strength against him.  I was forced to apply this principle more than once in college, when my athletic friends, invigorated by the joy of youth and a fifth of Jack Daniels, would suddenly realize how pleasant it would be to...

Even more than Vachel Lindsay, who liked to say that the Mason-Dixon line ran straight through his heart, Booth Tarkington embodied the regional conflict that defined the Midwest.  Born in Indianapolis only five years after the end of the war between the regions, Newton Booth Tarkington was descended on his father’s side from Southern Democrats...

Walter Block is a libertarian without guile, a theorist who refuses to confine his classical-liberal analysis to strictly economic questions.  Liberty is liberty, he would argue, and value is value, whether we are deciding a question of zoning or a case of censorship.  Honest man that he is, he opposes both zoning and censorship as...

“You’ve never been to Nish?!” My friend was incredulous. How can someone who has traveled, it sometimes seems, every inch of Montenegro, Bosnia, and Kosovo not have found the time to go to Nish? The lady is far from being a local chauvinist, but when I first met her and asked (as I had been...

The human universe, we are told by optimists on the editorial pages, is contracting into a gray and insipid doughball, pasted over with brightly colored labels advertising the only ethnic rivalries that persist: the struggles between Nissan and Daimler, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Unfortunately, there are people around the world who do not read...