Category: Correspondence

Many American children who are brought up on Mother Goose stories, as well as other fairy tales, may not know that their author was a 17th-century Frenchman, Charles Perrault. They may also not realize that the fable of the melodious grasshopper (in actual fact a cicada) who whiles away the warm summer months in full-throated...

When I was invited last spring to be a judge at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest some envious backbiters put it about that it wasn’t because I’m well known as a discriminating ami de swine, but because my sister knows the woman who picks the judges. I have just one thing...

It was one of those political pundit panels on C-SPAN. Mona Charen, neoconservative columnist, was asked to sum up her experiences in the Kemp-for-President campaign in 1988. Miss Charen grew unwontedly misty-eyed: “The [democratic] process,” she sighed wistfully. “The process was so wonderful.” It is doubtful if any of the presidential candidates or their handlers...

When in Rome, one should first try to see it as a city like any other. Easier written than done when one’s hotel is just behind the Pantheon and in its walls there are plaques commemorating that General San Martin, Bolivar’s fellow liberator, lived there, and that Stendhal worked on his Memoires in one of...

One evening last winter my buddy Eugene and I were shooting the breeze while we sort of half-watched the new, citified Hee Haw (it’s not the sort of show you want to watch alone, and my wife, a nose-breather, won’t watch it with me). Eugene had just finished telling the one about the difference between...

The girls are in dirndls. Usually pink, with a darker apron and neckerchief and a waist-cinching bodice of black velveteen, buttoned up under old-fashioned chests. Puff-sleeves of white starched blouses. They wear this folkloric costume quite unselfconsciously, about their everyday jobs, in bank or supermarket alike. This is a feminist’s nightmare. The apple-cheeked men are...

“America,” noted H.L. Mencken, “is a land so geographically tilted that everything which is loose rolls to California.” In the last few years, however, it seems that most of the great untethered mass has run out of steam amid the cactus groves of nearby Arizona, known in these parts as the poor man’s California and...

In February, I returned to Sweden after a 15-year absence, and discovered a very different land. In 1976, Americans were viewed with suspicion. We carried the immediate legacy of the Vietnam imbroglio and a vague reputation as “protofascists.” These were the heady early days of Prime Minister Olaf Palme. The Swedes were, as always, polite,...

Some people, mostly Southerners and geographers, like to argue about how you can tell whether you’re in the South. This discourse (if you’ll excuse the expression) can be more or less serious. My friend Vince Staten, for instance, once ran up a major phone bill calling restaurants on the Interstate to see how far north...

The following is an autobiographical account of a young black man imprisoned in Illinois. I met him in 1985, when I was teaching high school classes at a county jail, and we have kept in close contact ever since. He first came to my attention because of his cocky intransigence, but given another chance, he...

Driving a taxi in New York City is inextricably linked with the subject of race. While it is true that no subject is more vexatious for society as a whole, the taxi driver is forced to confront the issue in a way few others are. Though few New Yorkers have not been victimized by black...

Before the drive from California to North Carolina that I wrote about last month, I believed that American regionalism was alive and well. Now I damn well know it is. I’ll tell you what I am worried about, though, is England. Not long ago my wife and I flew direct from Charlotte to London. That...

England abolished capital punishment in the mid-1960’s when few capital crimes were committed there, and corporal punishment was abolished long before that. Sometimes when I am in Manhattan, reading of the constant homicides there, I recall the four “Mayfair Playboys” of my not-so-distant youth who were sentenced to the “cat” in two doses of eight...

In a case that ought to become a conservative rallying cry in the 1992 election campaign, the five commissioners in tiny Lincoln County, Georgia, went to jail last fall for what they saw as protecting the taxpayers’ money. In dignified single file, broken only by an occasional hug from a supporter and the “Bless You,...

Violence in New York seems to have escalated to a new dimension. It used to be that ethnic violence would erupt in the hot summers, to subside in the winters when those folks who live their lives in the street withdraw indoors for R & R. Now, however, at this writing in midwinter, violence has...

In April 1991 an aged Rolls Royce, vintage 1949, drew up to a small crowd outside the post office in Dublin. The president of the Irish Republic, Mary Robinson, stepped out for a brief ceremony, lasting less than half an hour, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising in 1916, when a group...

In a recent letter I mentioned the circuitous route my wife and I drove last summer on our way from California back home to North Carolina. The first day it took us past Bakersfield, where I’m told the children and grandchildren of Okies have imposed something resembling Southern culture on a part of California. (I’m...

There are those moments in which you travel back to some time and place you visited earlier. A trick of light, a confluence of sounds on a summer evening. Sometimes I am fooled into thinking that I am back in Latvia, where August nights around a white wrought-iron table on the grass lasted the length...

In May 1987 a meeting of about two hundred delegates from the four Western provinces met in Vancouver to discuss a common concern: alienation of Western Canada that resulted from the concentration of political power in an Ottawa largely controlled by Ontario and Quebec. Most of the delegates were small “c” conservatives who believed in...

A historical sense can be a wonderful thing to have. Not long ago, for instance, someone reminded me that when Christianity was as old as Islam is now, the Inquisition was going full tilt. When Islam gets to be two thousand years old, he suggested, maybe it’ll be as guilt-ridden and effete as Christianity has...

Two San Diego police officers, responding in the early morning darkness to a call that a school was being burglarized, arrived just as two suspects were fleeing into a nearby canyon. As the San Diego Union reported, the officers did not plunge into the canyon in pursuit—the terrain was dangerous, night visibility almost zero, and...

Last month, I wrote that Southern manners have taken the edge off class conflict in the South. Let’s explore that proposition a bit more. Fifty years ago, a North Carolina journalist named W.J. Cash published what quickly became a classic treatment of Southern history and culture, The Mind of the South. In that book. Cash...

Picture the scene: I am shoveling shavings into the team wagon, stooping over in my patched overalls and faded flannel shirt to scrape the barn floor clean, now and then climbing into the wagon to tread down the mounting heap. The young man who owns the new barn, the new tractor, the new hydraulic log...

Last spring, my friend Dick, a history professor here, was riding in a Long Island airport limousine when it stopped to pick up another passenger, an elderly lady burdened with luggage and confronted by a garden gate that wouldn’t open. After watching her struggle for a while, Dick’ got out and gave her a hand....

According to the early women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Social science affirms that a woman’s place in society marks the level of civilization.” If that’s so, the level of civilization “here in Cincinnati is high indeed, since one of the city’s most beloved and important institutions, the Cincinnati Reds, is owned and operated by...

We’re not supposed to like Germans or Germany, but I do—a lot. I found out just how much when, coming back to Frankfurt after a week of lecturing in Madrid, I found myself glad to be “home,” and happy to babble away in my pitiful German, after a, week of misery in my primitive Spanish....

As Americans continue their flight to the South from the regions that they’ve already ruined, I continue to monitor the low-intensity conflict between Yankee settlers and Southern natives. This public service is needed, I think, because we just don’t know much about what’s going on. Foundations and government agencies tended to see Southern migration to...

As far as I know, my friend Sissy has never written anything, although she probably reads more widely than most people I know with graduate degrees. She’s at first and probably second glance an archetypical ranchwoman. That first glance would be the outsider’s. Sis is in her mid-30’s, tall, taller than I am, and strong,...

I owe this trip to our secretary, Leann, who kept looking out for low airfares to Europe. Only a few days before she discovered Alitalia’s summer half-price sale, I had received another kind invitation to spend a few days at the Centro Internazionale per Studi Lombardi (CEISLO). I bribed my wife into coming along by...

There is good reason to be suspicious of the U.S. national park system. You can start with its origins. In 1864, an act of Congress seized the first parkland for the federal government, evicting some homesteaders from the Yosemite Valley and directing the state of California to administer the place. In the context of the...

A year or so ago, a concerned citizen asked Carl Fox, our district attorney, to listen to 2 Live Crew’s nasty album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of the Duke English department had just argued in the New York Times that the album’s lyrics were a valid expression of...

July 18, 1991. The temperature was 99 degrees, the hottest day since the summer of 1988. The humidity, as usual, was stratospheric (undoubtedly the reason they stopped broadcasting the Temperature Humidity Index years ago). The hitherto unknown Coalition for Black and Hispanic Jobs at the Port of New York Authority decided that this was the...

Two troublesome problems have, from time immemorial, bedeviled political regimes of every sort, from the most autocratic despotisms to the most wildly permissive of democracies. The first is the problem of advancing age and the kind of rigor mentis that is apt to afflict rulers during the final years of their “reigns.” The second, closely...

The English language is in danger. It is being invaded and infiltrated by the vulgar slang, the horrid jargon, the grammatical errors and the nasal pronunciation of the United States. Such is the nightmare of those crumbling remnants of the British establishment who still prize the affected tones of what was once termed the Oxford...

Academics have no more human frailties, I suppose, than are rampant in any other occupation. But those frailties are far more repellent, and far funnier, in a profession ostensibly dedicated to the disinterested search for truth. 1. The pettiness of the stage. Backstabbing and politicking in the Executive Suite to obtain a million-dollar post as...

Several recent letters from readers outside the South have contained clippings and firsthand reports about the progress of Our Nation’s cause. I hope my correspondents don’t mind, but I’ve come to think of them as a sort of intelligence service, even sometimes as a Fifth Column. One expatriate, for instance, sent along a brochure for...

As I write I have in front of me a number of statements, articles, and conference projects—and more are coming to my attention almost daily—indicating what amounts to an invasion of Eastern and Central Europe by Western zealots, do-gooders, investors, gurus, and sharks. They emanate from American and West European offices, banks, institutes, universities, and...

Highbrows like Chronicles readers may not know a television program called Americas Funniest Home Videos, but it’s just exactly what it sounds like. A story in Newsweek last year reported that the program’s staff were surprised to discover regional differences in the tapes that viewers send in. According to a man who screens submissions, the...

I’ll take my stand. There are a lot of topics around—collapsing savings and loans, collapsing universes, donkey basketball—on which I have skillfully walked the rail or else mumbled “no comment” while hiding my face behind a raised lapel. There is one subject, though, that I’m willing to stand up and be counted on. I like...

The recent war in the Persian Gulf has at least had the merit of dissipating one or two myths, even if it has also helped to generate new mirages. One of the most pernicious of these myths was the belief, shared by France’s former defense minister, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, and other members of the Franco-Iraqi Friendship...

After sharing my ill-informed impressions of California with you last month, I should probably just let it be. After all, only fools think they understand the South after a few months, and I presume the same is true for California. But expatriation here in the Spandex State seems to have dried me up on the...

Though it gets harder to remember with every passing day, one of the long-established premises of the recently ended Cold War was the notion that both the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. were engaged in an ideological battle for the minds and souls of the world’s population. In line with this the West used powerful...

An Anglo-Indian force of 24,000 men under General Sir Hugh Cough attacked a Sikh army of 52,000 at Gujarat in the Punjab on February 21, 1849. In the words of Byron Farwell, the Sikhs had “a splendid army. Its equipment was modern and it had the largest artillery park in Asia. The Sikhs made fine...

Our Scottish friends were trying to explain the phenomenon of the television police, and we were trying to understand. Television sets are taxed yearly in Britain and require an annual sticker. But since the sticker buying is done on the honor system, the citizens of Great Britain enjoy an occasional visit from the television police,...

Folks keep asking me when I’m going to write about California. (They generally lick their chops when they ask it. They seem to think I’m going to trash the place. I wonder why?) Anyway, yeah, it’s true that I’ve been living in the Golden State for several months now, and I haven’t said much about...

February 10 was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Mind of the South, WJ. Cash’s classic and, in the event, only book. Reading Cash was a formative experience for most members of the symposium-going class of Southerners, so there will be a number of gatherings to mark the occasion. As a matter of...

On September 30, 1990, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney addressed the World Summit for Children, of which he was co-chairman, at the United Nations in New York. The event climaxed 18 months of work by over 30 Canadian non-governmental organizations, much of it at the expense of taxpayers whose opinion had not been sought, but who...

Leo Widicker farms outside Bowdon, North Dakota. Last winter, Widicker had a quarter section—160 acres—that was badly wind-eroded from several dry summers and snowless winters during which there was no ground cover. Much of the topsoil had blown into a highway ditch. In May, a hopeful Widicker planted that quarter section in wheat. A crew...

How about three news items from a typical week in a Southern university town (Chapel Hill, May 1990), just to get the old motor warmed up after last month’s absence? A new law against urinating on the sidewalks resulted in a dozen arrests, nearly all of them beer-drinking students too pressed to wait or too...

Twenty years from now, when future historians look back at the 1980’s, some of them may be tempted to call it the “Decade of the Grand Illusion.” For not since les années folles, as the French still call the giddy 1920’s, has the Western world lived in such a state of deceptive euphoria. The besetting...