Category: Correspondence

Russell Kirk played a prominent role in founding and promoting modern conservatism in America—not neoconservatism, but the more traditional variety which emphasizes culture and tradition more than political programs and economics. He is known as the author of The Conservative Mind, The Roots of American Order, The Age of Eliot, and other “conservative” studies and...

I am actually writing this from a lonely place called Marsiliana, in the Maremma region of Tuscany, where my Florentine hosts have a hunting lodge. It is less than half an hour by car from the Argentario coastline, my inspiration for last summer’s seaside letters, and I remember driving past its desolate form whenever a...

The constitution of the state of Texas, my friends, is not what you carry to the beach for light summer reading. Light? Not at 90,000 words and 377 amendments. As Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost, “No man ever wished it longer.” Yet longer it gets, election year by election year, as the sovereign voters...

Thanks to a November election upset, Kafka, South Dakota—home of Lagado University—is poised to become the vanguard college town of 21st-century America. Joe Steele, a Lagado University English Department adjunct running as a candidate of the Farmer-Activist- Worker-Grad Student Alliance (a coalition of the Revolutionary Democratic Workers’ Party, the Workers’ Party of Democratic Revolutionaries, the...

In Something of Myself, his 1935 autobiography, Kipling remembers that when he was a young man, working for the English newspaper in the Punjab, “I no more dreamed of dressing myself than I did of shutting an inner door or—I was going to say turning a key in a lock. But we had no locks.”...

The pace of cultural redefinition in Britain is steady and strong. Since the day in 1991 when Prime Minister John Major refused to veto the Maastricht treaty, a new picture has emerged. To put it crudely, the Tories and the monarchy are looking unprecedentedly vulnerable. The only good argument for their continued survival is that...

The recent German federal election brought the remarkable defeat of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and the establishment of the most leftwing parliament and government in the 50-year history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The drag of incumbency—Kohl had spent 16 years in office—does not provide the essential...

The domiciliary organ of the host to which I have now attached myself is the cavernous Renaissance of every spiritual parasite’s dreams, most of it still inhabited, in that Cherry Orchard kind of way which keeps grand English country houses tottering but not always falling to the National Trust, by the descendants of the Florentine...

If 1998 is remembered in Australian political history for nothing else—a probable assumption, given the administrative gridlock which otherwise prevailed—it will go down in the annals for two events: Prime Minister John Howard’s upset reelection on October 3; and, of longer-term significance, Pauline Hanson’s failure to retain her parliamentary seat. This latter development eliminated the...

For nearly the whole of its history, “Israel” defined itself as a religious community, the community of Judaism. To be an Israelite meant to know God through the Torah and to accept the dominion of God’s laws set forth therein. No one had problems defining who is a Jew or what it means to be...

Winnie the Pooh and his friends Piglet, Rabbit, Tigger, Kanga, Roo, and Eeyore live happily in a comfortable bullet-proof home in the New York Public Library and have done so for many years. They have never expressed any desire to return to the Hundred Acre Wood or Pooh-stick bridge or the North Pole, the scenes...

The sun is no longer the hot buttered pancake worshipped by the ancient Slavs: It has been reformed into an altogether more Christian, Lenten, and distant figure. The sea is still beautiful, though it too no longer moves with the same pagan frankness, its orgiastic, by turns manic and depressive, barometrically motivated summer feasts and...

Winnie the Pooh and his friends Piglet, Rabbit, Tigger, Kanga, Roo, and Eeyore live happily in a comfortable bullet-proof home in the New York Public Library and have done so for many years. They have never expressed any desire to return to the Hundred Acre Wood or Pooh-stick bridge or the North Pole, the scenes...

Two or three times a week, after dinner, I watch the traffic jam outside Franco’s bar. What causes it nobody knows, but a perfectly ordinary intersection of two perfectly ordinary country roads is suddenly blocked. Nobody knows why the best watermelon is the one with the smallest spot on the bottom, or how come the...

A truly startling, topsy-turvy race is being run for governor of Illinois. U.S. Representative Glenn Poshard, the Democrat, is embracing more conservative positions on culture and social policy; Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan, the Republican, is running away with much of the Democratic base, including gay-rights supporters. On trade, Poshard has supported a Buchananite...

Even an expert must be mystified by the legal structures of the European Union Parliament and the European Commission. The EU Parliament has roughly 620 deputies, elected every five years from 15 Western European states. Voters from ElU countries have no decision over the election of other countries’ deputies to the EU Parliament. The president...

The promontory of Monte Argentario, billowing on the clothes line of the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy like an Hermes shirt held in place by three pins of land, is famous for its summer resort towns of Porto Ercole and Porto Santo Stefano. The shirt, which has been lost so suddenly by so many here in...

Enoch Powell is dead, and it is as if a hill has suddenly vanished from the horizon. British life, conservative life, political philosophy, economic philosophy, classicism, Biblical studies, and learning generally are all the poorer for the death of this English original. Powell was a man of many contradictions—classicist and romantic, patriot and imperialist, politician...

In the days before my life became a perpetual holiday, there was always the pair of inquisitive Italians across the table who wanted to know why I had chosen to live in London. They saw I was a writer, and an unambitious one at that; why not live in Italy? They saw I liked eating;...

The Day of Atonement by its very advent at sunset on the eve of the tenth of the lunar month of Tishré atones for sin and involves repentance—regret for sin, resolution not to repeat it—prayer, and fasting. Not the rites of the day, the prayers of the day, and not the act of refraining from...

Apart from talking about cooking while eating and about eating while not eating, Italians have a favorite subject, a kind of pet peeve, which they touch upon at least a dozen times a day in that same disarmingly artless voice in which the English exchange news of the weather. It is a fact that the...

U.S. District Court Judge Elizabeth Kovachevich here in Tampa ruled in January that it is all right to teach the Old Testament but not the New Testament in public high schools. Concerned that the state not sponsor religion, Judge Kovachevich permits “the history of the Bible” but not “the Bible as history.” So far so...

In his 1942 swan song, The New Leviathan, dying British philosopher-historian R.G. Collingwood called the life of the mind “a magic journey.” Remarkably free of illusions regarding the life of the university, however, Collingwood argued for “domesticating” professors, rather than being subject to them. But things have only gotten worse since then. Whether “public” or...

Well, from New York actually, with a stopover in London where we took on board and I was able to read again England’s four competing and mutually adversarial “serious” daily newspapers, not counting the specialized Financial Times: the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, and the Guardian. None of them is perfect, or perhaps even...

Ever heard of the Federal Protective Service? Like the commercial says—you will. I was taking a photo of the federal courthouse in Billings, Montana, when the police pulled up and stopped me. They asked me for my I.D. When I looked more closely at the cop’s badge, I realized it wasn’t the Billings Police. It...

The expansion of NATO has been hotly debated by American conservatives. As a conservative Catholic Pole living in Poland, I am obviously interested in this debate, not least because Poland and America are part of the same civilization. Any matter of importance to either nation has to be seen within a wider context of the...

American Jews (like other organized subgroups in American society) do some things superbly well and fail at others. Where we are strong, there is our weakness. When I consider the mistakes we American Jews make, these simple truths explain much. By “mistakes,” I refer to enormous, fundamental errors of public policy: the management of Jewish...

There may not be a word for “home” in French, philosophizes Twain in The Innocents Abroad, but “considering that they have the article itself in such an attractive aspect, they ought to manage to get along without the word.” Who has not seen semantic peculiarities insinuate themselves, with the facility of cognac taken on the...

Conservatives, with and without an upper case “c,” have still not recovered from last year’s electoral disaster. Even the drama of the Conservative Party leadership election, and the surprisingly comfortable Conservative victory at the subsequent Uxbridge by-election, have not removed a general feeling on the right of shock and bemusement. Even now we cannot believe...

In my letter last month I tried to describe the noble seriousness of Italian life, unique in that it has given the modern world a middle class with a human face. Even on a simple physical level such as that of the naked eye or of the camera lens, one can observe this seriousness like...

I have always wanted to spend some time in Rome, for a whole rosary of personal reasons. As with much else in a person’s private life, to recount these in print is to expose oneself to public ridicule. Yes, Rome is a wonderful city. Yes, the food is good. But then in England, where I...

Dr. Samuel Francis describes secession as an “infantile disorder” and casts The League of the South in the role of Margaret Mitchell’s impetuous Stuart Tarleton in contrast to the part he imagines he is playing—the cool, rational Rhett Butler. But if Dr. Francis had bothered to read the League’s literature, he would have learned that,...

Years ago—so long ago indeed that I hesitate to record the date—a wise lady of Hungarian origin said to me in Vienna: “Oh, to be able to see Venice again for the first time!” It was one of those casual remarks which, behind the smiling mask of a truism, reveals a hidden, monitory depth. Contrary...

On January 9, 1997, in an open letter in the New York Times to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, American artists and intellectuals criticized the discriminatory treatment of Scientologists in Germany. Although the petitioners claimed not to be biased in their complaint by sympathy for this church, their objectivity has to be questioned, for there are...

Eleanor Holmes Norton has proposed to reopen Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House for limited automobile traffic. She convincingly testifies that a barricaded executive palace does not properly reflect our standing as a shining “city upon a hill.” After two long years of paralyzing traffic jams due to the paranoid closing of the...

He went to Wrigley Field on a hot day last June, along with several hundred others, to hear family and dignitaries eulogize columnist Mike Royko, who had spent more than 30 years banging out five columns each week while working for three different major Chicago newspapers. Otherwise empty because the team was on the road,...

In modern Germany, where even discussion of political ideology is a matter which has to be treated with extreme circumspection, political debate centers on the safer area of financial management, and in recent years the main purpose of financial management in Germany has been to ensure a smooth path toward full European unification. Since the...

When American drug czar Barry McCaffrey visited Colombia last October, the two-year freeze on top-level contacts between the United States and the world’s foremost producer and exporter of cocaine finally came to an end. U.S.A Colombian relations had reached an all time low last March, when Washington “decertified” Colombia—meaning Bogota can no longer qualify for...

Horror stories about punishments for insensitive behavior on college campuses are old news. But leftist hypersensitivity has permeated everyday life in the real world as well. In Manassas, Virginia, a white woman called 911 at 3:08 A.M. to report that some black men—whom she referred to as “niggers”—were trying to break into her house. According...

Editors’ note: Our hometown of Rockford, Illinois, is celebrated by pollsters as one of the most demographically average cities in the United States. Not surprisingly, then, our political, economic, and cultural trials reflect those of the country at large. In “Letter From Rockford,” a recurring column, Rockford writers will examine local issues that have national...

I recently noticed an article in the Trinidad Guardian about two male teenagers who had been charged with savagely “chopping” an old man (though not to death). Each youth received a sentence of 42 years in prison plus 20 strokes of the birch. It was the latter part of the sentence, the instrument designated by...

We live in an increasingly hysterical, media-manipulated world in which almost nothing is sacred anymore except—the words must be italicized to emphasize their gravity—except popularity, or, to be more precise, what is popular. This was one of the first thoughts that occurred to me when, shortly before 8:00 A.M. (French time) on Sunday, August 31,...

Leave it to Yale to hoist itself by its own snoot—the snootiest college in the country has finally given itself its own comeuppance. Yale has declared promiscuity, or at least exposure to aggressively promoted public promiscuity, to form an integral part of “the Yale experience.” They’ve told some nice Orthodox Jewish boys that, if they...

I won’t say congratulations on your appointment because the wreckage left for you to pick up is horrendous . . . and the abuse you will take if—and, please God, when—you attempt to clean it up could shorten your life. While you have crisscrossed the archdiocese to introduce yourself, I have seen positive traits. As...

John Major lost the British election in 1997 not because Tony Blair’s “New” Labour Party had stolen the Conservatives’ policies but because the Conservatives adopted socialist ones. The last ten years have seen an explosive rise in levels of bureaucratic regulation in Britain, which have particularly hit small business and also professional people, especially those...

While the media is focused on the alleged threat of a few rural white supremacists holed up somewhere in Idaho, black racism in the inner cities is on the rise. “Viet family flees bomb threat at project,” blared the headline in the San Francisco Examiner on June 16. Although political correctness forbids even its victims...

Judge Roy Moore of Etowah County, Alabama, was sued by the ACLU and something called the Alabama Freethought Association (Unitarian-Universalists, I believe they are) back in 1995 for displaying the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall and for beginning each session with a prayer by a Christian clergyman. Over the past year, the affair has...

The Hispanic elite have decided that the best way to control the lives of millions of Latin immigrants and illegal aliens flooding into America’s cities is to prevent them from learning English. The elites can then preside over a separate, parallel “Hispanic Nation,” full of angry, illiterate victims of “white racism.” Recent developments at the...

Education has long been a political hot potato in Britain. For decades it has been the central issue that links national politics to the politics of the localities, the politics of class, and the politics of party. This might appear surprising in a society where over 90 percent of schoolchildren are educated in government schools,...

A poem with a vivid title has started a brouhaha at the Mood Disorder Clinic at Western Psychiatric in Pittsburgh. “Nigger Do Not Speed In My Town” was discovered on a desk by two black employees who reported it to the EEOC as evidence of a racist environment at the Mood Disorder Clinic. The offended...