Category: Correspondence

Tony Blair’s regime manages to be simultaneously comic and tragic, with a slight tilt toward tragedy. The government is made up of chinless Christian Socialists, Anglophobe Scots, aggrieved proletarians, shrewish women, and militant homosexuals—most of whom seem to detest each other. The members of the Cabinet all have grandiose schemes, which tend toward unfeasibility and...

Except for the filming of 61¤, the upcoming movie about the home-run race between Yankees Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris in 1961, there was no action last summer at Tiger Stadium. The Detroit Tigers have ditched their historic home at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Trumbull and are entering their second season at their...

Sometimes, though not very often, one has the occasion to discover that, deep down beneath the surface, things are actually better than they seem. Some years ago, when she was unequivocally and irresponsibly young, my English friend Natasha G— came to stay with her godfather, Franco Zeffirelli, at his villa in Positano, where a newly...

After an uninterrupted spell of a winter month or two here in Venice—all footsteps in the evening mist, and quiet conversation about the best way to cook pheasant, and a Neapolitan card game called “seven and a half—what one notices on arriving in London is the way women move. First of all, it’s the speed....

It was just before Christmas, and for some reason I thought the fishing would be good in the Dominican Republic during that time of the year. I had no information to that effect, but a friend, who does not fish, spoke favorably of DR (that’s how many refer to the country). The tarpon had left...

You had to look closely to see the thick strands of barbed wire in the shrubs in front of my hotel. I’ve traveled all over the world, including to Kosovo, but this was the first time I’ve stayed in a hotel that was fortified. The staff explained that it was there in case of another...

Giovanni and I were both in Milan for the day, and he asked me to join him for lunch at Bice with a friend of his, Lauren Bacall. The expensive restaurant was quite empty, we drank a good bit, and the conversation ranged from the actress’s favorite New Yorker cartoon to the particulars of life...

Kelli Moye has become the pretty young face of America’s culture of death. Standing trial for the cold-blooded murder of her newborn daughter, she has provided us with a test case for Middle America. Should Roe v. Wade ever be overturned, states and municipalities will once again be free to pass legislation regulating abortion. How...

“Irish Americans are often disappointed when they come here,” remarked the Scottish chatelaine of our pretty B&B on the Dingle Peninsula, as she served us our breakfast of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. “They expect to see thatched cottages with leprechauns popping out from shamrocks.” “Played by Barry Fitzgerald or Arthur Shields?” “Yes, and girls...

The first chill of autumn, which reminds us locals to order firewood from the mainland for our illegal fireplaces, is always a moment of reckoning. Not for nothing does the Russian Aesop, Krylov, in his fable of the socially responsible ant and the bohemian dragonfly, suggest that such a moment has arrived when a wintry...

I was disappointed. Here I was at “Let’s Go Dutch” Days in the little western Wisconsin town of Baldwin, on an overcast August day, and I could not find any wooden shoes. Sure, Dutch flags were flying on Main Street, and I doubted if I could find another police department in America that had Holland’s...

It’s late September in Russia, and Muscovites are already placing wagers on when the first snow will come. The weather has simply been too good to be true; the sun has been shining and the temperatures mild, which, to the Russian mind at least, is a bad sign. The Russians have never trusted good fortune...

In the May 2000 issue of Chronicles (“Letter From England: New Gaybour”), I wrote that there was a good chance that Section 28 (the portion of the 1988 United Kingdom Local Government Bill that forbids the promotion of homosexuality among schoolchildren) would be retained through the current Parliament at least, because of the Labour Party’s...

Tazwell is a town in Claiborne County, Tennessee, about 45 minutes northeast of Knoxville on Highway 33, just south of the Kentucky border. On the muggy Saturday morning of June 3, 2000—the 192nd anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis and Confederate Memorial Day in Tennessee — some 200 people gathered in Tazwell’s Irish Cemetery...

A recent article in the Baltimore Sun gave a wonderful example of how the media view traditional Christianity. Under the headline “Vatican Orders Activists’ Silence,” the Sun presented the latest installment in a local saga that is beginning to rival one of the national soap operas in its duration. In the 1970’s, a Catholic priest...

Among the unaccountable peculiarities of this diary, and indeed of my general wav of seeing things, is that one can never expect to learn something of Capri from my impressions of Capri. And yet, I keep asking as though to placate myself, why should it be otherwise? I am aboard the Stamos with a group...

The birth of modern Croatia was closely tied to the paternalistic image of one man: Franjo Tudjman. A self-described nationalist and anticommunist, Tudjman ruled over Croatia for ten years until his death in December 1999. In January 2000, presidential and parliamentary elections brought to power a motley crew of reformed communists, liberals, and globalists. The...

Everyone in Britain knows that it is just a matter of time before Scotland becomes independent and reverts to medieval chaos. The English Labour Party’s plan of establishing a devolved but subordinate parliament in Edinburgh to be dominated forever by inept Labour MPs recruited from the decaying slums of Glasgow has failed. The secessionist Scottish...

A team of Yugoslav journalists from Narodni Telegraf recently visited Camp Bondsteel, invited as guests to what used to be their country. Bondsteel is the largest U.S. military base in the Balkans, and in what seems a bad omen, the biggest that the U.S. military’ has constructed since Vietnam. It is being erected in the...

Vice President Al Gore did not bother to answer the letter in which a dozen or so prominent Italian pro-family leaders, intellectuals, and politicians called for him to withdraw his endorsement of the recent World Gay Pride parade in Rome (see “Letter From Rome,” August), but he did respond to a similar message from the...

I start this story not at my own desk in the Palazzo Mocenigo, but in a hammock suspended between two graceful pine trees in a place called Oliveto, up in the Sabine Hills, an hour’s drive from Rome. The settlement of a dozen houses is dominated by the Villa Parisi, a medieval casale set in...

Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush says that immigration “is not a problem to be solved. It is the sign of a successful nation. New Americans are to be welcomed as neighbors and not to be feared as strangers.” In 1996, the Republican platform advocated an end to granting automatic citizenship to children born to...

Contemporary debates on the nature of American nationality—are we a people possessed of a shared tradition and culture, or are we simply a mosaic of ethnic groups that function in a common system?—find their counterpart in contemporary Israel. The legitimacy of Israel as “the Jewish state” is called into question not by Palestinians or Israeli...

My summer vacation along Lake Superior’s western shore into Canada took place just before the anniversary of a milestone, although it was marked by no celebrations or remembrances, and nobody I saw on mv quick stay in Thunder Bay showed any sign of acknowledging it. The anniversary was not the subject of conversation in the...

The photographs were commissioned by a music company for the cover of Andrea Bocelli’s next cult album. The last one had sold five million copies. We were visiting the popular tenor at his house in the resort of Forte dei Marmi, and decided to spend a few days at one of the town’s innumerable beach...

On February 6, 1998, the Mexican consul general in California, Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, spoke at the Southwestern School of Law in Los Angeles as part of a symposium on the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the Southwest to the United States. Osuna proclaimed, “And even though I am saying this part serious,...

After the Battle of Gettysburg, a prison camp was established in occupied Maryland on a low peninsula lapped by the waters of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. All told, 52,000 people—Confederate soldiers, Maryland and Virginia civilians, blockade runners, and spies—passed through the portals of the “Andersonville of the North.” In 1910, because erosion threatened...

Hawaii is a liberal state. Despite being heavily Catholic, it was the first state to legalize abortion. There is no death penalty, or even life sentences. Labor unions still wield considerable power. The Democratic Party enjoys one of its most solid majorities in the country. Most of the few Republicans in elected office are barely...

St. Louis Cardinals slugger and homerun record holder Mark McGwire had a bone to pick with Major League Baseball. He was none too happy that the first regular season game of the 2000 campaign, matching the Chicago Cubs and the New York Mets, was played outside the United States—in Japan, no less. The major leagues...

Summer in Venice means tourists. Do I hate them? No more, I assure you, than a patient stricken with a mortal illness hates the individual viral agents, or virions, which are draining the nucleic-synthesizing energy of his body cells to replicate themselves. He hates the disease, which is making him weak, old, and ugly even...

Since many Jewish institutions and individuals speaking “as Jews” (or so they say) favor unrestricted abortion, pro-life people often assume that Judaism does, too. But when we distinguish the personal opinions of individuals from the doctrines of a faith set forth in authoritative holy books, matters prove more complex. And when we realize that, from...

The Confederate flag, which had been in a place of honor (though not sovereignty) above the South Carolina capitol for almost 40 years, was removed in the stealth of the night of June 30/July 1. The removal was made possible because all but a handful of Republicans in the legislature, who had pledged not to...

The European Union has reiterated its appeal to all member states to press ahead with the legalization of homosexual unions, but resistance to the homosexual agenda is growing—especially in Italy. The recently deposed government of Massinio D’Alema had proposed to prohibit discrimination based on “sexual orientation.” Persons or groups violating this law would have faced...

The chairman of Ford Motor Company, Jacques Nasser, in a videotaped address to a group of top executives forced to endure another in a series of “diversity-training” seminars, stated that he did not like the sea of white faces in the audience and that one of his prime directives was to ensure that in the...

An interior bond ties me to America, where one of my grandfathers is buried. He tried the adventure of emigration, without ever rooting himself in a regular job and without managing to send a penny to the family in Italy, until he died almost certainly in an almshouse. My other grandfather crossed the Atlantic in...

        “Down to Gehenna and up to the throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.” —Rudyard Kipling Not as horrible as Calcutta or as ugly as Seoul, Bangkok, spreading along the flat flanks of the Chao Phraya river, is the whorehouse of Asia. Berth girls and boys will do anything you...

“We don’t have anyone else from the third congressional district. We need you to fill out our slate,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, a dispatcher from Pat Buchanan’s national headquarters. I couldn’t believe it. The third district of Wisconsin stretches over a sizable portion of the western part of the...

I now want to add another likeness to my Gogolian gallery of Venice’s living souls. If this continuing series should start to take on the blurry aspect of a spinning carousel, becoming a kind of soap opera of fleeting impressions, all I can say in my defense is that the development is an intended one,...

As a displaced Southerner sojourning in Kansas, I’ll never forget the time I wandered into the statehouse and encountered John Steuart Curry’s mural. One section features John Brown, girded with sword and pistol, mouth and eyes agape. Mosaic beard jutting off at a right angle, brandishing a rifle in one hand and the Good Book...

Taxi drivers in Belgrade, like their counterparts everywhere, know almost everything about almost everything. However, they do not know who murdered the controversial commander of the Serbian Volunteer Guard (SDG), Seljko Raznatovic Arkan; Yugoslav defense minister Pavle Bulatovic; and several other public persons and big gangsters this past spring, but they know exactly who did...

In mid-January, those Parisians (like myself) who are still interested in literary matters were aroused from the smug complacency in which we had been wallowing for several weeks, as dazed survivors of the millennial earthquake and the pyrotechnic cancan put on by a shameless Eiffel Tower, by an unexpected thunderclap. The thunderclap was ignited by...

A couple of months ago, I was in Milan for an “Homage to Giorgio Strehler” at the Teatro alla Scala. This was Mozart’s Don Giovanni, conducted by Riceardo Muti and wifli a cast that, at least to my unspoiled ears, represented the sort of perfection that one only reads about, ruefully, in yellowed reviews of...

I grew up in Alden, New York, a small town about 20 miles east of Buffalo. My parents still live there, and they (especially my mother) are very active in the town historical society and its museum. In that museum is a worn old wooden desk, unremarkable except for the sign that explains that it...

Did I make a wrong turn? Did I go too far north? No, I was still in beautiful Port Pierce, Florida. What shocked me into thinking I had accidentally wound up in South Carolina was a flag: two red bars diagonally crossing a solid white background, suspiciously resembling the dreaded Confederate Cross. There it was,...

When I was ten, I fell into the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. With him, I fled the dinosaurs of Pellucidar in the center of the earth; in the company of the anthropoid apes, I sought the fabled jewels of Opar. I wondered at the hurtling moons of Barsoom, and gasped for oxygen in the...

When the religion of Judaism speaks in its contemporary modulations—whether Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, or integrationist-Orthodoxy—we should hear many voices. But instead we hear one: the voice of left-liberal politics. With the exception of self-segregated Orthodoxy, most (though, happily, not all) rabbis preach a secular doctrine of leftwing orthodoxy. That is puzzling, because the Torah—Scripture (the...

On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered the last remaining European colony in Africa: South Africa. From all sides and nations, the hope was that the 72-year-old Mandela, convicted and imprisoned 27 years before for treason, would bring down the edifice of apartheid and build, in its place, the new...

Last year, when I first came to live here—as bearer of the Carta Venezia, the photo ID which entitles the city resident to buy water-bus tickets at 75 cents instead of the tourist’s three dollars, I have every right to say “live” rather than “visit—I made a private pact with Neptune and the spirits of...

In 1988, the Conservative government passed the Local Government Act. The most controversial part of the Act was Section 28, Subsection 1 stated: A local authority should not (a) intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality or (b) promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality...