Category: Correspondence

Religions may explode in human history—Christianity conquering Rome in scarcely 300 years, Islam the Mediterranean basin in scarcely a century. But they die only here and there, only now and then, and renew themselves in times and circumstances none can predict. God has a good sense of humor and a still better understanding of ourselves...

It may not be the start of the Great Middle American Revolution, but the reaction of residents in Lima, Ohio, to a heavy-handed public housing plan shows that some Americans are still willing to stand up for their communities. A declining industrial city of 45,000, Lima has seen its share of hard times in recent...

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...

Coal miner. What’s that bring to mind? Someone dumb and dirty? I used to think so, and I’m born, raised, and living smack in the middle of Virginia’s Appalachian coalfields. Well, actually not the middle. More like the fringe. Virginia has 95 counties but only seven that are coal-producing, and all seven are in the...

Vietnamese gangs shake down proprietors of small businesses for protection money. Blacks have enormously high rates of drug addiction, alcoholism, crime, and out-of-wedlock births. Pakistanis, Lebanese, and Nigerians drive cabs. Japanese buy up downtown highrise and choice beachfront properties. Chinese and Koreans take control of sections of the intercity. East Indians and Arabs run small...

There were two reasons for my visit to Belgrade last fall. His Beatitude, the Serbian Orthodox patriarch Lord Paul (82 years old), invited me to his official residence to honor me for “my endeavour to interpret objectively the all-Serbian tragedy.” I was decorated with the Order of St. Sava I, the highest decoration of the...

Pittsburgh’s Human Relations Commission did the right thing in January in the pizza “redlining” case against Pizza Hut brought by Carl and Shelia Truss. The Trusses, a middle-class black couple who reside in a mixed-race area of well-kept homes in the upper Hill District area of Pittsburgh, also known as Sugar Top, phoned Pizza Hut...

Last fall, an editor at my suburban Boston daily urged readers to reflect on “a personal essay, lyrical but not flowery,” by one of our “neighbors” at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Framingham, the state penitentiary for women. “The least we can do,” he wrote, “is put our ears against the tall brick walls” and...

Despite Dublin’s busy streets, Dublin still has a country-town atmosphere, and the visitor has a definite sense of being just a little behind the times. Part of the reason for this ambiance is that Dublin is a very small capital city. There are only a million or so people living in the whole Greater Dublin...

My wife is president of our county’s landmark society, and though my inability to tell a cornice from a frieze renders me a hapless consort in matters architectural—more Denis Thatcher than Hillary Clinton—I am nonetheless proud of her. For preservation seems to me far less an aesthetic ruffle than an emotional and spiritual necessity. “Preservation”...

The inauguration of Lagado University’s new campus in Plagho-Plaguo, the capital of Dismailia, is generating great excitement throughout the Diversity Community. As President Bleatley has said, LU’s “Semester in Dismailia” is guaranteed to challenge Eurocentric cultural values on every level and at every turn. It centers the Other, presents the Absent, privileges Multiplicity, and promises...

Eleven years ago an Englishman called Peter Mayle followed in so many of his countrymen’s footsteps and, tired of rain and taxes, bought a house in sunny Provence. The book he wrote about his life there, truly no more than a bundle of anecdotes about funny foreigners and their enviable gastronomy, did remarkably well, despite...

“It’s a new day, and a new way!” exulted Adelaide Sanford on television in early 1985. A black supremacist and member of the New York City Board of Education, Sanford was the candidate for schools chancellor of the Reverend Al Sharpton and “activist attorneys” Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason (both of whom have since...

Cross Shaftesbury Avenue going south toward Leicester Square, and you leave homosexual London for Peking-on- Thames. Decorative oriental-style iron gates, like in some 18th-century pleasure garden, mark the various entrances to the small area which is officially designated “Chinatown.” Oriental shops, restaurants, hairdressers, travel agents, and apothecaries selling Chinese medicines are crammed along and spill...

Rather than dropping out of the sky into Bulgaria at the Sophia airport as I did, travelers would be better advised to enter by other ways. Driving up from Greece through the Rhodope mountains would be one appealing way. Another fascinating approach would be to sail into the Black Sea city of Varna or the...

And . . . she’s outta there. On June 12, Marge Schott, the embattled majority owner of the Cincinnati Reds, was given the heave-ho by baseball’s powers-that-be, forced to relinquish day-to-day control of her ball club through the 1998 season. In an ongoing effort to polish Major League Baseball’s tarnished veneer, the august guardians of...

Last June, the tradition of 157 years at single-sex Virginia Military Institute was changed by the vote of seven Justices in Washington. The statue of Stonewall Jackson still guarded the parade grounds, but the general who stood like a stone wall at Manassas could not prevail against those seven Justices. His slogan is still emblazoned...

When the Supreme Court declared Christmas a secular occasion, to be celebrated for its lowest-common-denominator cultural value in the public schools, I expected serious Christians to protest. Here a powerful public body officially secularized what for the history of Christianity has represented a most sacred moment. But so deeply have the forces of secularization, organized...

Jonny Gammage died on the night of October 12, 1995, in front of Frank and Shirley’s pancake parlor, just three miles from my home. Jonny was a black man, a cousin and business partner of Pittsburgh Steeler Ray Seals, and he died in the custody of five white suburban policemen who had pulled him over...

“Mommy let me live!” screams the tasteless headline of a pro-life ad, complete with scary pictures of a baby’s diary; “May 1; Today my parents gave me the gift of life. . . . One week has passed and look, I’m no longer a single cell,” and so on through the year. Here are the...

April 19, 1995, is a date etched in the minds of all who live in Oklahoma City, because it was on that day at 9:02 A.M. that the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed. Just as most Americans alive at the time of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination remember where they were when they...

Latin elections are such vibrant theater, unlike our plastic-coated, high-tech soap operas, I thought I might catch the presidential election in Ecuador this year. Besides, there was an off-again, on-again war with Peru to give an edge to the trip. Not long into the journey I got all the edge I would need for the...

An annual Vermont tradition occurs on the first Tuesday of March: Town Meeting. It is actually a state holiday; many businesses and all schools and state offices close for the day. This year, as every year since I returned from the Marine Corps, I make the trek from graduate college to home to participate. While...

“Is it possible heterosexuality is a phase you will grow out of? Are you heterosexual because you fear the same sex? If you have never slept with anyone of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer it? Is it possible you merely need a good gay experience?” Far from rhetorical questions and...

Gradually the security alerts on the Underground had become less frequent, and Tube drivers had even stopped telling passengers to take their personal belongings with them when leaving the train. Eventually the alerts ceased altogether, and searches on the way into museums and major tourist attractions became desultory and perfunctory. Londoners relaxed and forgot all...

In order to do research for a novel, I spent January and February of this year in Chile, thereby avoiding a particularly bitter winter in Washington, D.C. My intention was to pass most of my time in Santiago and spend only a couple of weeks touring the South. After about a week in the capital,...

One’s kindest possible response to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s typical attempt at a sitcom is Mark Twain’s quip about The Vicar of Wakefield: “Nothing could be funnier than its pathos, and nothing could be sadder than its humour.” Hence the astonished pleasure inspired by the Corporation’s dazzling new comedy Frontline. A merciless skewering of current-affairs...

St. Petersburg—A while back, synagogue members and civil rights groups picketed the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, when the Coral Ridge Ministries held a conference on “Reclaiming America for Christ.” The local newspaper reported, “Thousands of Christian activists from across the nation discussed such topics as, ‘reclaiming the public schools,’ ‘battle for our...

Readers who have been attentive to the slashing edge of the Postmodernist Project will be aware of Lagado University’s vanguard role at the Modern Language Association’s 1995 meeting. On that occasion a session conducted entirely by the LU English Department’s faculty, “Intersections of Sex and Animal Husbandry: The Love that Dare not Low its Name,”...

According to former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, New York City is safer than it has been in years. And if you believe that, I’ve got a great deal for you, on a slightly used bridge. Last December, the NYPD announced that violent felonies had dropped 17.2 percent for the previous 12 months, their...

With Missouri frozen solid for two February weeks in a row, naturally one’s thoughts turn to the Southern Hemisphere. There were some hot spots in our beloved country even this winter—Miz Hillary was testifying before a federal grand jury, the Rose Law Firm was smoking, and Mr. Starr was building a few fires of his...

“I don’t want to have to carry a handbag all the time” was the way an aggressive British opponent of the compulsory carrying of identity cards (as proposed by several members of the British government) yelled it to me recently. In fairness I should add that this defender of supposed civil liberties was svelte and...

On the night train from Kiev to Simferopol I share a compartment with Volodymyr Prytula, a Crimean journalist. Called “Vova” by his friends, this slender man with a Zhivagoesque mustache is my sole contact in the Crimea. He speaks little English, I no Ukrainian or Russian, but we communicate with the help of Ukrainian red...

Late one night recently, after pub closing time, I walked through the back streets of Whitechapel again, something I had not done for several years. The sight of the familiar streets and the old smells and sounds reminded me of the six months when I had lodged there, during which time I had grown to...

We stopped for gas and food in Chamberlain, perched on a bluff above the grand Missouri River. A clear late summer Thursday evening in South Dakota, and we were halfway to the Black Hills, where on Saturday the 55th annual Sturgis Rally and Races—one of the world’s largest congregations of Harley Davidson aficionados—would kick off....

The jurors who tried the 14-year-old black boy who shot and killed three widows last year, one of them my own dear neighbor, found him guilty and gave him several life terms. By law, he got the maximum. He is too young for the death penalty. It is beyond me. If you are old enough...

The fall of 1995 may be remembered as the time when the miscast and overheated melting pot cracked and spat its singed ingredients all over us. O.J. Simpson was freed, Mark Fuhrman convicted, and Louis Farrakhan lectured us “on the idea that undergirds the Western world, white supremacy.” But while O.J. walked, Colin Powell posed,...

Oliver Wendell Holmes used to say that upon first glance at the books in a library “one gets a notion very speedily of the [reader’s] tastes and the range of his pursuits.” One can only imagine what Holmes would have thought about our “range of pursuits” had he visited the University of Michigan’s Harlan Hatcher...

British television, like television almost everywhere, is dominated by left-wingers masquerading as liberals. As a consequence, British television often denigrates those traditions and institutions held in most affection by the indigenous inhabitants of this country. In the interstices, it finds time to celebrate and promote everything that is not British, or at any rate not...

For practicing Christians, Judaists, and Muslims, what is at stake in state-sponsored prayer in public schools is whether the particularities that make us what we are make a difference. Constitutional issues aside, there are strong theological arguments against legislating prayer for young people. Specifically, nonsectarian prayer speaks for no one in particular and addresses Whom...

Getting from the Crimea to the Republic of Georgia presents several problems. I had been told that one way was to get to Trabzon on the Black Sea Coast of Turkey, and then take a boat to the coastal town of Batumi in Georgia. A guidebook had warned that foreigners could not cross the Georgian-Turkish...

As widely reported last year, a statue of Arthur Ashe has joined those of the Confederate heroes that grace Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Were the issue only, or even principally, the desire of Richmonders to commemorate the life and accomplishments of their native son, the proposed memorial would have excited little debate. But these...

The motto “Justice and Dignity” appears in almost every letter and comunicado of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). The two concepts lay at the heart of the peasants’ uprising in Chiapas. The Mexican State of Chiapas has 3.4 million people, 35 percent of whom arc Indians speaking 18 different languages. The land is...

It is 10:00 P.M. as you step off the Greyhound bus in Laredo, Texas. By all rights you should feel exhausted after your 36-hour ride from Minneapolis. But the truth is, you feel pretty good. The air is cool but muggy on this late-August night. You are told that the Rio Grande is just a...

As the car purred southward into the blue distance along the Kent-Sussex border, I felt as if we were gently falling into the sea. As you approach the Marshes, you are approaching a land which has always had an ambiguous relationship with the sea, which has always looked seawards rather than landwards, which bears little...

A small people with a distinctive religion, the Jews throughout history have tried to avoid imitating the Gentiles (that is, everybody else), lest assimilation destroy the faith and the group that embodies it. In fact, Scripture’s passionate denunciation of idolatry led the ancient rabbis, “our sages of blessed memory,” to condemn certain practices under the...

As recently as 1882, Neasden in north London was an obscure hamlet of several large houses, a few cottages, and a smithy. Then the Metropolitan Railway and, later, the North Circular Road went through and thousands of often jerrybuilt houses sprang up along their lengths, as London bit ravenously into Middlesex. Although Neasden rapidly became...