Category: Correspondence

When I first heard that V.S. Naipaul was writing a book about the South, it made me nervous. What would the author of Among the Believers make of Jim and Tammy? Could we look for Louisiana: A Wounded Civilization? Well, I’ve been reading A Turn in the South, just out last winter from Knopf. I’m...

It is heartening to learn that economic growth is largest in countries where the government is least meddlesome. Such information is of great significance to the utilitarian argument for liberty, for it hurts the Marxist where he bleeds the most: in showing the material superiority of capitalism, which is constantly denied in the Communist press....

Elsewhere, life is predictable: the State Legislature wants a raise, Khomeini wants someone dead. Tiny Tim is running for mayor of New York, and Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith are pregnant, ecstatic about it, and planning to move up the date of their second marriage to each other. Inside the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes,...

Commencement has come and gone, and with it another crop of eager graduates. Yet given far more of the spotlight at any of these commencements than bachelors’, masters’, and doctoral candidates were those being awarded honorific degrees and certificates. The practice of universities bestowing honorary degrees originated as a way to give public recognition to...

Ever since 1914, when the unity of European socialism was virtually shattered by the decision of some share-the-wealthers to support their own nations over the claims of the international class struggle, a furtive little thought has been gnawing at the progressivist mind like a mouse chewing on a rafter. That thought is the suspicion that...

A joke going around down here asks why Southern women don’t like group sex. The answer: too many thank-you notes. You know of course that I wouldn’t besmirch the pages of a family magazine with such smut if it didn’t speak directly to this month’s topic. (No, not group sex. This isn’t the Penthouse Forum,...

In America, we can judge the significance of an event by the pre-maturity and questionable taste of the memorabilia it spawns. In mid-January 1989, three months before the Women’s International Bowling Congress (WIBC) was scheduled to descend upon Bismarck, North Dakota (pop. 45,000), the J.C. Penney store was selling T-shirts that claimed “I Survived Bowling...

When President-elect George Bush announced a week before his inauguration that his new “drug czar” would be former Education Secretary William Bennett, the air began to seep out of the tires of his new presidency before it even got on the road. Had Mr. Bennett ever participated in a drug arrest, had he ever worked...

The invitation to the first symposium came from my old alma mater, the Free University of Brussels, founded by liberals, freemasons, and socialists, all united in their opposition to the Catholic Church, embodied by the 15th-century University of Louvain. Nostalgia drove me to the once well-known quartiers, or rather what remains of them now that...

Canadians often try to explain the fundamental nature of Canada, both to themselves and to visitors, by comparing it with other countries. The United States most obviously comes to mind, especially since television has increasingly obliterated any differences in American and Canadian popular taste. But there are other analogies that are more instructive. Surface manners...

I was sitting here listening to the University of North Carolina’s student radio station play “Hotrod to Hell,” a cut from Elvis Hitler’s new album Disgraceland (you think I could make that up?), and somehow the time seemed right for another round-up of Southern news that they’ve probably been keeping from you. Speaking of the...

It took millennia for North Dakota soil to acquire what nutrients it has (and they’re substantial) in the Red River Valley along the eastern border, the silt-rich bottom of huge prehistoric Lake Agassiz. It took only a hundred years or so for man to nearly deplete it. And now John Gardner, a North Dakota agronomist,...

Last year, when I was in Helsinki, I made a great discovery:, probably the best informed people on Soviet affairs are the Finns, whose Russian-watching goes back almost two centuries, long before the Bolshevik coup of 1917. I was in Finland talking with veteran analysts, official and unofficial, about the overpowering Soviet military presence that...

My buddy Ben is a newspaperman in Wilmington, North Carolina. Like many in his trade, Ben is a connoisseur of the grotesque and absurd, and occasionally he sends along a bundle of clippings and wire service bulletins, worth of Elvisiana, and I thought some of you might be interested. After all, a column last year...

In The Wall Street Journal on June 16 last, Mr. Alexander Cockburn—whose regular presence in the premier organ of capitalist opinion, by the way, nicely illustrates Lenin’s maxim about rope—argued that the current antismoking hysteria is a capitalist plot. The loathsome Cockburn adduced an article in an obscure publication of the Spartacist League that maintained...

We do not live in a golden age for homegrown and corn-fed radical critics. Legal restrictions on political speech remain few, but informal strictures and the passage of time have muted those who remember—and like—the free, landed republic that this country used to be, before World War II and the monolithic Cold War state that...

I have never been a flag-waver, nor felt much sympathy for howling mobs, particularly when bent on destruction. But since this year, 1989, marks the bicentennial of the world’s first and most influential revolution (there is hardly a revolutionary notion or motif that cannot be traced back to Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Babeuf, and their spiritual...

If George Bush accomplishes nothing else in his lifetime, he has at least earned a secure niche in future editions of Trivial Pursuit. Not since Martin Van Buren trounced the Whigs in 1836 has an incumbent Vice President been elected to the White House. The lackluster record of Andrew Jackson’s successor perhaps does not inspire...

Though he never came here, Walt Whitman knew India was more than a country: a subcontinent, madhouse of religions, seedbed of civilizations, primordial and immemorial. “Passage to more than India.” How to cope with this vital mess, this messy multiplicity? These hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of thousands of villages? I have learned...

I like that old-time rock and roll. I’m sure nostalgia has a lot to do with it: the older I get the better the 50’s look. But there’s more to it than that. I like what the music says about America, and especially about the South. Let me explain. Some time ago, a geographer at...

“Poets in our civilization,” a famous poet wrote in his most famous essay, “must be difficult.” He went on to explain his thought, and his Englishspeaking audience understood him. When the thought was translated, it went on living in other languages. But would an English-speaking audience understand his famous lines: Please come with me When...

Fun for the whole family, the ad for the movie said. (I was relieved to know that it wasn’t zany or lafF-packed, although later I would have settled for that.) Our kids, then eight and 13, deserved a celebration for lasting through the final day of school before Christmas vacation, so, loaded with grotesque candy...

I had occasion to visit Pendleton, Oregon recently. It is the “purple mountains’ majesty, above the fruited plain” that we sing about, only the peaks that rim the valley bowl are the Blue Mountains, and the fruit of the land is animal as well as vegetable. Pendleton is famous for its glorious woolens, which you...

Browsing at a local newsstand the other day, I spied a startling comic book, issue #11 of Captain Confederacy. Its $1.95 price was even more startling (the last comic book I bought, back about aught-56, cost something like 15 cents), but I had to take this one home, and did. Let me tell you about...

It’s Sunday morning in London. The Sunday Times is here. (Yes, we too have a Sunday Times.) The “Week in Review” section is nice and fat. (Yes, it’s nice and fat here, too.) Headline: “End Game: Why the Soviets are pulling out of Afghanistan.” Photo of Najibullah, photo of Gorbachev, photo of two smiling soldiers....

It used to be a pleasure to cross the Seine from the Left Bank to the Right, and to pause for a moment by the Louvre to take in that glorious vista, admired by innumerable busloads of tourists and many others besides: the view one gets, framed by the graceful central arch of the diminutive...

A wise man once observed that the existence of a nation requires that many things be forgotten—in particular, those things that divide its people. Maybe that’s why the South never made it. Black and white Southerners have had their little disagreements in the past, of course, and so have flatlanders and hillbillies, rednecks and gentry....

Eastern Montana: a gigantic plate of congealed gravy. Chicken gravy. A shimmering, menacing, pale silver-yellow, begrudgingly patched with some better-off-nameless light green culture. We’re talking stubble here in this drought year, not chest-high grain. The gravy platter stretches east and west for 500 miles, from just inside the North Dakota border to Shelby, Montana (dare...

T.S. Eliot notwithstanding, April is almost certainly not the crudest month. For the tens of millions of urban dwellers along the Eastern Seaboard who had to sweat it out this summer in conditions of infernal heat, as for the millions of others who watched despairingly as their wheat stems and cornstalks wilted across the parched...

Ten people are gathered around the table in a Chicago kitchen. Most of them are Kentuckians who left the farm for the factories during World War II. They brought with them what is called in the country their “ways”—their love of simple food, their attachment to plain music, their conviction that their money, their politics,...

I moved to a small island in Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay. Newfoundland was settled mainly by fishermen from western England and from Ireland; to this day more than 80 percent of the population is of that origin. Yet I have been told that, geologically, Newfoundland is part of the Appalachian chain, with a piece of Scotland...

“I am on the one hand a kind of New York State Republican, conservative. On the other hand, I am a kind of a Bohemian type. I really don’t obey the laws. I mean to, but if I am in a hurry and there is no parking here, I park.” —John Gardner Batavia’s wandering native...

This month I’m writing from the lower right about what works out to be the far left: San Francisco. (My first visit, not long ago, with wife and daughter. OK, lots of people have been to San Francisco. Some even live there. But they’re not writing this column.) Let’s give credit where it’s due: the...

She’s embarrassing and unpredictable, known as a “gadfly” and a “maverick” (among other names). She admits she’s never been a joiner. She has alienated both political parties and the Minnesota media. There are no topics on which she doesn’t have a strong opinion and no circumstances under which she would stifle any opinion. One cringes...

Having done four years of graduate work at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, I was distressed to learn that there, as elsewhere, a few radical activists can rout a weak administration and faculty by crying “racism.” Last February a special Task Force on Race Relations released a report to justify the subordination of education to racial...

Back in the spring there was a lot of hoo-rah in northern Virginia about a plan to build a shopping mall on part of the battlefield at Manassas (“Bull Run” to Yankees). At first, some of us down here suspected a federal plot to obliterate the reminders of two humiliating defeats, but it turned out...

Our sixth-grade daughter’s class made the “Hiroshima lanterns” late in May when the North Dakota Peace Coalition came to her parochial school. The kids painted the paper sides of the 8″ x 8″ boats with rainbows and flowers and the word “peace,” and made plans to light the candles and set the boats afloat on...

“Peter Ustinov’s Russia” has been making the rounds of Public Broadcasting television stations with a timely plug for Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost, and raising the hair on the back of my neck. The British-born comedian, author, and mimic confesses, with the shrug of a sophisticated actor, that his series is not the complete story. It...

A flyer plugging yet another “excellence book” hit my “in box” recently— another reminder of the infatuation of American business with the “pursuit of excellence.” We passionately love success, just hate second place, and truly disdain failure. The drive to excel provides rewards both psychic and material—no question. But I believe it also harbors a...

The banging was first heard somewhere in the Alsace countryside, an hour or so after the train left Basel. For some reason, local worthies invariably pronounce the city’s name the French way, making it sound like the pagan deity denounced by the Hebrew prophets. The temples of Baal, in this unconscious interpretation, are the ubiquitous...

Election Day nears, and two faceless candidates leer ahead of us like dopestarved punks who know there’s nowhere else for us to go. They need a fix, and in the process we’ll lose our money and our dignity. If that’s all we lose, I guess we’re lucky. These strange men (and the occasional odd woman)...

When I left the University of Chicago a few years ago, I felt the whole world lay ahead and that every opportunity was open to me. I decided to go on with graduate school but took some time off to work as a research associate for a think tank in Washington, DC. One problem that...

It’s a tale of two cities. There is the Prague that travelers meet as they enter: an endless succession of socialist concrete apartment houses, socialist sportsfields, socialist parks with socialist cement statues. The hotel we inquired about was unknown to most socialist passersby, and when we finally reached it, we found a modern concrete block,...

Last September, some readers may recall, my letter was devoted to Viktor Suvorov, the pseudonymous writer and former GRU officer who now lives in England under yet another assumed name. It has taken me nearly a year to track down the author of Spetsnaz. Soon after our conversation begins, he recites in Russian: In ’41...

When I wrote about Jesse Jackson recently, I said his politics were those of a black Jim Hightower, meaning that if he were white his politics would guarantee him obscurity. But if it’s a flaming leftie you want, Hightower is actually a much more interesting proposition than Jackson. You’re unlikely ever to get the chance...

As this is written, the annual Council of the Church of Sweden is meeting here, proceedings which will last to the end of the month of August. As the name implies, Sweden has a state church which is Lutheran in confession. Its origin, like that of the Church of England, was based on the whim...

It was hard times down at the Bismarck chapter of The National Organization for Women. The girls were tired of playing “Old Maid” and “Hangman” all day, and to some of them even the prospect of a date with a fascist warmonger executive was beginning to look good. Something had to be done, and fast....

Talking recently to a Polish friend who has lived in both Canada and the United States, trying to explain the vitality of my countrymen to him, I said finally, “Unless you’re an American, you don’t know what being alive is!” To which he gloomily replied, “And no one knows what death is till he moves...

After my March letter, “Three Days in Sodom, Two in Gomorrah,” readers of this magazine have written to ask why I am so down on conspicuous consumption. I want to go on record here: I am not. But even a gourmand should disapprove of gluttony, since pleasure exists only insofar as it is subject to...

My advice to anyone who wants to see some of the most polite people around is to get to Chile soon—before we declare war on it or the media level it into the likeness of a London suburb, with a bust of Lenin in every town hall, tax-funded homes for lesbians, and a veto on...