Category: Correspondence

We are headed north on Interstate 35 from Austin to Dallas, on the tail end of an unexpected trip to Texas. The dog days of August have not been quite as unbearable as we anticipated but are still startlingly hot by our Alaskan standards. Beside the interstate, we glimpse many small Protestant churches, mostly of...

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Roy S. Moore, the Etowah County (Alabama) Circuit Judge, for having the Ten Commandments on the wall of his courtroom and for beginning each session with a prayer, on the usual grounds that a “wall of separation” stands between government and religion. Judge Moore agrees—up to a point....

Dubious parallels, like old prejudices, die hard. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt unleashed his legislative whirlwind in the winter and spring of 1933, and more particularly in France since 1986, it has become a standard cliché to judge a new government’s performance on the basis of its achievements during its first 100 days in office. If...

Someone must have put a snake on a fence, because it’s raining for the first time in weeks. Jerry the Barber knows what causes weather changes, and if you are fortunate enough to count yourself among his clientele, he’ll explain it. For example, Jerry knows a woman in Waverly, Alabama, who can break a storm....

Both recent and longer-term history throw fight on British distinctiveness within the European Community. It is apparent that enthusiasm for the EC, let alone a federal Europe, is limited in Britain, and that much of the history of political convergence over the last 40 years is to be sought in the calculations of particular politicians...

With the government seizing at least half our incomes each year and the “multi-diversity” crowd sowing seeds of anger and disunity that could well lead to civil war down the road, I hear more and more people talking of places to relocate themselves and their capital: New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and Costa Rica. And Chile....

Hometown of John F. Kennedy, Brookline, Massachusetts, blends small-scale charm with a shabby urbanity. Plugged like a weak rib into Boston’s west edge, Brookline is laced with picturesque trolleys and dotted with quaint buildings. Its citizenry is an odd mix of recent immigrants from Russia and the Caribbean, college students, seniors, a tasteful dollop of...

The present long period of Conservative Party rule in Britain, which has now endured for almost 16 years, has fooled many into believing that we live in a right-wing, conservative country. Even moderate leftists sometimes declaim against the “Tory regime.” the fascistic conspiracy they believe deliberately excludes or discommodes their various pet minorities. The white,...

A few months ago and despite my better judgment, I spent some time watching the NFL playoffs. Seeking relief from rather than in work, I soon was reminded that the tube is a conduit of malaise and of pop cultural propaganda. For every glimpse of the tenacious gifts of Dan Marino, there were hours of...

Simone Weil wrote, with respect to literature, that “nothing is more beautiful, wonderful, ever new, ever more surprising, more sweetly and lastingly intoxicating than the good. Nothing is more arid, sad, monotonous and cranky than the had. Such are authentic goodness and evil. The fictional good and bad are opposite. The fictional good is cranky...

Virginia, the cradle of the American Republic, has proved to be a particularly tempting locus for the designs of the capitalist Utopians. Our own conservative Republican governor, George Allen, with the general support of the state party and Washington’s Republican press organ, has led the charge of the developers’ earth movers on the state’s countryside,...

Across Serpukhvskaya Street from my apartment is a vintage Soviet-style “Palace of Culture,” its blank concrete walls topped by an immense neon sign. Ten years ago it offered lectures on class consciousness to factory workers; now it houses a discotheque, which plays American rock music until 6 A.M. Ten years ago an order from the...

“It is a noble faculty of our nature which enables us to connect our thoughts, sympathies and happiness with what is distant in place and time; and looking before and after, to hold communion at once with our ancestors and our posterity. There is a moral and philosophical respect for our ancestors, which elevates the...

We saw them at dawn: a dozen men in ragged camouflage, lugging dull black weapons glinting like poised snakes. Their faces rugged like Arizona bluffs, dark brown or brick red, they moved without a sound, like the mist rolling out of the forest. Large and beefy, they stood around our campfire and smiled at us....

Generation X, to which I belong, is a pious generation. You can easily become alienated from it unless you adopt the correct attitudes. Without the sociopolitical skills that today masquerade as good manners, it is quite possible to talk one’s way into trouble. The last time I felt threatened by educated middle-class people was in...

Italy experienced a revolutionary election on March 27, 1994, an election in which many Italian voters could make a difference. This mood of optimism and engagement stood in stark contrast to the many elections that have left Italians so disillusioned in recent years—local administrative elections, national elections to two houses of Parliament, and even international...

In 1959, Frank Sinatra starred in immigrant filmmaker Frank Capra’s last movie, Hole in the Head. Featuring the Academy Award-winning song “High Hopes,” it was about a widower father (Sinatra) struggling with a mortgaged hotel on Miami Beach. Miami was a year-round, warm and sunny resort for Northeasterners. Culturally, it was a suburb of New...

“The Jews” stand in people’s minds for so many things that you can find their despisers in places where there are not many Jews around to hate—or even enough to attract much attention to begin with. Take, for example, that outlying fringe of the settled world, New Zealand, where I spent last summer (winter in...

Last year, the Board of Education for the Zanesville, Ohio, City School District was handed a hammer capable of striking a blow for the forces of good in the battle over the direction of public education. Unfortunately for this community, the board dropped the sledge squarely on its foot, seeking immediate relief by planting the...

Laser beam surgery has now made it possible to correct many common eye defects caused by irregularities in the shape of the lens of the eve relative to the size of the eyeball. For those with severely impaired eyesight, this means a welcome escape from a serious handicap. However, for children who are only mildly...

It is over ten years now since the last Cuban left Grenada. My wife and I happened to own a retirement property on the island less than a hundred meters from the huts put up to house the thousand-odd “freedom fighters” sent down by Fidel Castro (whom I met) to spread the Good Old Cause....

Celt, Roman, Angle, Saxon, Dane, Norman, Pict—and Bengali, Afro-Caribbean, Turk, Arab, Chinese. Glyndebourne, swan-upping, roast beef and Maypoles—and arranged marriages, bowing to Mecca, halal meat, chop suey. Harris tweed—and saris. Anglicanism and Catholicism—and Diwali, Rastafarian New Year, Ramadan. Milton, Shakespeare —and Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison. All of the former, traditionally British things have been, are...

The once-mighty Russian Army is in a state of disarray. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it lost much of its substance and all of its moral bearings. So far, nothing has replaced the latter. To compound matters, the citizenry, once proud of its armed forces, tends to look on them with disdain or...

Imagine what kind of organization would adopt the following resolutions: to oppose state and local referenda and statutes restricting the civil rights of gays; to support the use of fetal tissue for the purpose of life-saving or life-enhancing(!) research; to advocate a single-payer system as the most likely means of fulfilling the principles articulated in...

I attended two symposia in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in October and December 1993, and clearly Belgrade and Serbia had changed since my last stay there. The famous cafes in Belgrade were almost empty; most shops had almost nothing to offer. The people were out of money; the sanctions had practically made a...

You may think of Louisville, Kentucky—if you think of it at all—as a sprawling, midsize, metropolitan community of 800,000 m the Upper South. But like most other American cities, Louisville is legally not one community, but many. County-wide there is a total of 95 governments: Louisville, the county, and 93 small cities. There are also...

After two days of intensive sight-seeing in St. Petersburg, Russia, not so much a city as a cemetery holding the remains of what was once a city, I returned to Finland and turned on the St. Petersburg TV channel that we get here in Åbo. St. Petersburg TV was broadcasting a show Åbout Russian Jews...

Christmas was approaching, and I was getting homesick. I’d been in honduras for a year and a half, teaching school for peanuts at a small, bilingual parochial school in Puerto Cortés. Ok, ok. I was teaching school for lempiras, not for peanuts. But the difference is so slight that it isn’t worth arguing about. In...

It was a sleepy Sunday afternoon when a section of the national AIDS quilt visited Winthrop University. The sun, slipping low into the tops of the pines, shown red across the sparsely populated campus. With many students still enjoying the waning hours of another weekend spent elsewhere. Rock Hill, South Carolina, was not up to...

The day after last year’s election that torpedoed our nation’s most advanced experiment in “Outcome Based Education” (OBE), a pleasant-faced teacher appeared on the evening news. “Shocked and depressed,” she said she was. “I’ve been teaching for over 15 years, giving the kids the best education possible. And to have them win like this. It’s...

It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...

A recent series of articles in the Baltimore Sun painted a gloomy (yet persuasive) picture of “the decline of the Baltimore City Police Force.” But then, why should police forces be expected to maintain high standards when all institutions are falling in what’s left of America? The Sun stories basically explained how affirmative action lowers...

The more I learn of Italy, the less I know. Several years ago I thought I understood the essentials of the Italian political scene, that I was a Tocqueville in reverse. But ignorance was Tocqueville’s great advantage, too, and it is always easier to make out the forest when you are willing to ignore the...

Marines are a direct lot, not much given to subtlety. Their simple nature enables them to spot a ruse from the 500-meter line, and, on the issue of sodomites, they have quickly identified as nonsense Mr. Clinton’s doublespeak about “status” and “conduct.” Marines, well known for advertising their “status” by their “conduct,” know that the...

“Australians all, let ostriches, / For we are young and free”—the attempt by an expensively educated Australian schoolchild to notate the first two lines of Australia’s national anthem (the first line of which is “Australians all, let us rejoice”). Bill and Hillary not surrealistic enough for your jaded tastes? Alarmed by passing signs of incipient...

The bad news for Pennsylvania’s economy is that the Clinton health care plan takes direct aim at the state’s two biggest employers—the health care sector and the restaurant industry. Pittsburgh’s single largest private employer is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a world leader in cancer research and transplant surgery with a staff of 12,000....

It was all the way back in 1860, when Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, participated in an open debate with T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s leading supporter, that at least for England the evolutionary debate was effectively decided once and for all. The bishop was judged to have lost the argument by virtue of his memorably snide...

I have just escaped from 15 months in a hell that I once knew as Sarajevo. Ours is the fourth generation of my family to claim this ancient, cosmopolitan, multiethnic city as our home. My family is classified as Eastern Orthodox Christian. In the context of the present war, that makes us Serbs. I have...

One day last September I was visited by a couple of guys who were writing a cover story on the South for a Dutch magazine. They had been to Darlington, Tuskegee, Oxford, Charleston, and other shrines of Southern culture, and I was pleased to see that Chapel Hill was still on the list. Over Allen...

Last September, 17-year-old Utah resident Aaron Chapman found himself caught in traffic outside Salt Lake City’s Triad Amphitheater following a rock concert. Chapman’s red flannel shirt attracted the attention of eight to ten Tongan Crip gang members, who surrounded Chapman’s car and began taunting him. Although Chapman ignored the harassment, the Crips began to punch...

April is the crudest month, according to Mr. Eliot. But I believe March is crueller. For March is Women’s History Month, and from out of every crevice and dark hole, like Orcs scurrying from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Minas Morgul, come she-things swinging their war-axes, craving blood and ideological battle. Behold, the wrath of Mordor. Feminism is...

“You want to go see Bo Gritz burn the U.N. flag?” My libertarian neighbor Bill, during the final days of the last presidential campaign, was making me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I have always been half-frustrated by mv failure to take advantage of all those radical activities in my college days during the 60’s....

“Let me marry / Or buy me a banjo / For I must pluck / At something!” sings Milosli Dragichevitch, a Serb from Ozren Mountain in Bosnia. Milosh is a 50-year-old whose eyes twinkle darkly as he laughs at jokes about Serbs and Turks, made up by someone diabolical, somewhere in Bosnia. “Two Red Berets,”...

Animal rights protesters in Britain have now extended their campaign of sabotage to fishing. Members of the new Campaign for the Abolition of Angling, with its headquarters in Sevenoaks in Kent, have taken to disrupting angling matches by stirring the water with bamboo canes and banging dustbin lids under water to drive the fish away....

As the Air Croatia plane began its descent into Zagreb, it came to me that I had no idea where I was going. The Chesterton Society conference was to be held downtown at Europski Dom, but the participants were being put up at a Jesuit seminary. In a city of nearly a million, the Jesuits...

As America’s melting pot rapidly cools, citizens are rushing to align themselves with their proper tribe and then petition the government for special treatment to redress historical grievances. While blacks, American Indians, and Hispanics already bear the governmental imprimatur of the oppressed, Asians made a key step toward achieving official victim status in 1992 by...