Category: Correspondence

Some of us down here took exception a while back when John Aldridge referred to Jimmy Carter as “a redneck peanut farmer from Georgia.” We felt it was a gross libel on rednecks. Of course, Aldridge didn’t mean to be complimentary. Calling our former President that was about as malicious, as offensive, and as beside...

Boyhood was once a distinct and definable stage in the life cycle of the American male. It was also by the standards of today almost unbelievably innocent. At least it was in the small Midwestern city where I grew up just before the Depression. There was no available sex or television. Drugs were unknown; racial...

My formal association with Chronicles began in February 1986, when, at the suggestion of its editor, I wrote an obituary of Philip Larkin. Looking back at the history of my loves, I explained that I had decided to buy and edit The Yale Literary Magazine because “my ambition in life was to find the poet...

Did you ever wonder why Jewish neoconservative thinkers never argue “from” Judaism, in the way in which Michael Novak argues from Roman Catholicism, and Richard Neuhaus argues from Lutheran Christianity? That is to say, Judaism never forms a point of departure and never defines a court of appeal. For the Jewish neoconservatives Judaism simply does...

Deborah Epstein Popper is a graduate student in geography at Rutgers University, and Frank J. Popper chairs the university’s urban studies department there: in New Brunswick, New Jersey, about as far away from the Great Plains, in every way, as you can get. The Poppers published a long article in the December 1987 issue of...

To that select few who have frequented its precincts, it is simply “The Major’s.” In reality it’s the “Globe and Laurel,” along Virginia’s Route One near the main gate to the U.S. Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia. Its proprietor is a sandy haired, crewcut, toothbrush-mustached, immaculately turned out, retired Major of the U.S. Marine Corps:...

At the last American Political Scientists Association (APSA) convention in Chicago (September 3-6, 1987), I was immediately struck, and happily so, by the unusual attention given to historical matters. This certainly was a reflection of the convention’s theme that was a response to last year’s bicentennial celebration of the national Constitution. Nevertheless, there were two...

The taxi ride to Manhattan after the first shuttle flight of the day from Washington puzzled me. Why did scenes that should have been familiar from 30-odd years before seem so new and strange? I was the Brooklynite who had grown up on the buses (and before them the trolleys) and the subways of the...

What now are called “the Indian wars” ended about a century ago, and the participants in those battles are dead without exception. After 1886, when Geronimo and his band surrendered, there were no more off-reservation wild Indians. Native Americans had become an administrative, not a military problem. The reservations would become a policing system where...

In April 1986, Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Minister and the Massacres was published in Britain. Like his earlier Victims of Yalta (1978) and Stalin’s Secret War (1981), the book was uncompromising in its indictment of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan personally and of British foreign policy generally at the end of the war. “In the second week...

The influx of Northern migrants to these parts continues to produce misunderstanding. Some time ago, the good people of Hillsborough, North Carolina, gave up their right to shoot marauding vermin in their own backyards to an official municipal squirrel-shooter. Citizens whose nut trees were being sacked, gardens despoiled, or houses chewed up (it happens) could...

Anxious to be liked, mainstream Churches roll over and piddle on the floor regularly these days, and seem to do so with the greatest vigor in the spring, when the pasqueflowers sprout on virgin soil and the “renewal” comes to town. Fundamentalist Protestants have had “renewals” for ages and call them “revivals.” Neophyte Catholics and...

On the morning after Election Day, the front-page headline of the Philadelphia Daily News said it all, not just about the events of the day, but about the possible future of Philadelphia: Goode Squeaks In Rizzo Won’t Quit Incumbent Mayor W. Wilson Goode won, by unofficial count, by about 14,000 votes (2 percent of the...

Recently, someone asked me to review Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but so far nothing has come of it. The book, published by Rutgers University Press, is the fruit of many years’ work under the direction of Joseph Frank, author of the voluminous Dostoyevsky biography. It contains a selection of 152 letters, culled from the...

Last summer, on the 10th anniversary of Elvis’ death, a reporter called to ask the usual question: What does it all mean? Ah, that took me back. To be precise, it took me back to August of 1977. We were living in England when Elvis died, and I noticed at the time that the BBC...

My first-grade son was recently bitten in the arm by an exuberant classmate. Luckily (said his principal) my son was wearing a heavy jacket, and the boy’s teeth didn’t puncture his skin: “Human bites are even more dangerous than dogs’, you know,” she reminded me. Yes, I’d read that, and agreed that we were lucky—and...

“Party for a book? I’d love to,” I mutter to my host as we land in Sodom. Five days of vacation lie before me, and as we drive to the place—”Where the old McAlpin used to be, downtown,” the limousine driver reminisces—it is pleasant to think that people here still publish books. After a ride...

It hasn’t escaped attention down here that it’s an election year. My buddy Eugene, who cares about these things more than is good for him, explained to me the other day why George Bush is going to be our next President. “Well,” he said, “first we had Jimmy doing his Woodrow Wilson impression, right? Upright...

Conversations with those who have traveled throughout the Eastern Bloc reveal that group tours, not solo travel, are the rule rather than the exception. For a hefty fee, vacation moguls will relieve the prospective tourist of three major brain drains: consular relations (visas), hotel accommodations, and transportation. Group tour-guides will provide the serious history enthusiast...

I had the intense pleasure of visiting the White Mountains of New Hampshire in August. Although I’m happy where I am, I think I could be happy there, too, and if anyone wants to give me a family-and-pet-sized cabin halfway up a mountain, write to me in care of Chronicles. I fell in love with...

Representative Ron Gamble’s speech on the floor of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives against legislation to divest Pennsylvania pension funds from South Africa: I oppose this legislation wholeheartedly because state government has no business dealing with foreign policy. However, if we are going to initiate a foreign policy based on compassion for our fellow man,...

“Did you hear what happened to the swan?” Tucked away in the residential area along suburban Philadelphia’s main line lies the idyllic campus of Eastern College. For the last four years this Christian academic institution has sponsored the Evangelical Roundtable: an attempt to find definition in the ideologically shattered realms of Evangelical-land. “The Roundtable,” says...

For centuries philosophers have grappled with the question of how society should be organized. The overarching issues involve the maintenance of order and the distribution of political power. While the answers to these knotty problems varied greatly from Plato to Burke, there was a belief that these concerns were essential lineaments in social organization. Even...

According to Josef Joffe, foreign editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German historian Ernst Nolle once asked at a Harvard seminar whether anyone present could find the idea of the “Final Solution” in history before Hitler. Since no one answered, he drew the attention of his audience to the work of Marx and the concept...

One of the most moving war memorials I know is on a wall outside the reading room of the British Museum. It is a simple plaque with the names of a hundred or so librarians killed in the Great War. Librarians. Think about it. That plaque makes a point, doesn’t it, if not perhaps the...

“What ever happened to real men . . . the kind of men with good old-fashioned values like honesty, integrity, sincerity, and ambition?” asks FOOD—Farmers of Ongoing Determination—in a promotional flier. It turns out that they think they have a corner on the real-man market—and I’m willing to let them suspend my disbelief. North Dakotans...

Corn planting season has arrived again, and the soil is moving. Hot spring winds that have foresters on red alert are picking up the earth, clay fractions first, and sending it off. This gale mocks the fine print don’ts on the 50-pound sacks of rootworm pesticide. It too is blowing in the wind. No way...

I hold in my hand the names of 205 credit-card-carrying members of the human race who’ve been described by a word that’s fast becoming as irritating as superstar, glitz, or life-style. The word is genius, and it’s time we recognized, with all Churchillian gravity, that from Stettin in the Baltic to the psychobabble retreats in...

Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Cayambe, Antisana, Tungurahua—the jaw-cracking, eye-chart names thunder from the map with the grandeur of the 6,000-meter, snow-capped volcanoes most of them are, staking out the spine of the Ecuadorian Andes, some of the world’s finest scenery. Indeed, no fewer than 11 such nevados may be seen on a clear day from the Latacunga...

I never thought I would be a sucker for royalty, but there is now a good reason to admire Prince Charles. He hates Richard Rogers. In August, the British press reported on the dismay of the nation’s “architectural profession, flinching at the prospects of another outburst along the lines of ‘monstrous carbuncle’ (the Prince’s dismissal...

Last October 1, Florida’s new handgun law went into effect and the talking hairdos on the evening news had an arched-eyebrow contest. As you may have heard, law-abiding Floridians, tired of being an unarmed minority in the Sunshine State, rared back and passed a law that allows any Floridian with no police record, $145, and...

I came across Mitch Snyder’s name the other day. Remember Mitch? He made the news first about three years ago, when, as head of the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV), a Washington-based “homeless rights” group, he spoke out against the indignities perpetrated against 61 -year-old Jesse Carpenter, who “froze to death in the shadow of...

Americans generally agree that our public schools are not what they should be, but the strongest resistance to improvement comes from the jokes some people refer to as “teachers’ unions.” Take the strange ease of a Minneapolis nonprofit corporation. Public School Incentives (PSI), which has proposed some interesting measures for public schools. PSFs founder, Ted...

Among the hottest selling items in toy stores across the land is the “G.I. Joe” series of military action figures. Since the “Star Wars” movies, war toys have made a strong comeback from their depressed levels during the “antiwar” 1970’s. Model figures based on “Star Wars” characters proved so successful that others quickly entered the...

Every day we hear references to North, South, East, and West, to Midwest and Southwest, to Pacific Northwest and, lo, even to Ozarkia, Cascadia, and Siskiyou. All of us speak or write of these geographical areas as if they had narrowly prescribed boundaries readily meaningful to everyone. Yet in reality these designations, as Humpty Dumpty...

If in political and social terms the diminishing role of the aristocracy in Europe was, in the historian’s view, inevitable, in cultural terms its dissipation was not really felt until the turn of the century. Indeed, the intellectual history of our time is a record of careless exploitation and ruthless expropriation of what had once...

Time for another round-up of Southern news you may not have seen. Let’s start off slow, with this item from the Chapel Hill (NC) Newspaper, back in February. Arnold D. Rollins of Rt. 5 Box 372, Chapel Hill, reported a hit-and-run accident on Columbia St. and Rosemary St. at 11:30. According to police reports, a...

It’s Charismatic Prayer Sharing, Thursday nights at 8:00 P.M. in the Community Room of the large Catholic church I attend with my family. Because I’ve been wanting to learn to pray better, I went recently. Lou, the man I’d talked to on the phone, walked over and greeted me. Another, Stan, a seraphic, unkempt. round...

The AIDS plague should be approached temperately because, like the Kennedy assassination, it is one of those universally frightening phenomena that is likely to ignite the pool of vulgarity, hysteria, and kookery that lie just below the surface, among the high as well as among the low. Having casually followed the pronouncements of the government...

The event known as the accident at Chernobyl will be remembered by history for the scarcity of contemporary information about it in the world at large, a degree of ignorance far more remarkable than the event itself. The event, after all, was diagnosed as an accident, which made it interesting to the antinuclear left; was...

It’s mid-May, and Kate and I live in deep trepidation over the possibility that the Philadelphia Flyers will win the ugly looking, but highly coveted, Stanley Cup. Not that the town couldn’t use even such a minor honor. Two years ago, the city was lambasted worldwide for fielding its own air force and killing II...

I guess I should have known it would be an odd trip when the pilot told us as we were approaching Memphis that we could expect “a little choppiness, but nothing untoward.” Untoward? I was going to Oxford, Mississippi, last spring to lecture at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture....

The Knights of Columbus Club is just beginning to buzz as we pull up at 7:45, 15 minutes fashionably late. Our cars hold two families of three people each; the two small boys—cousins, one in each car, for sanity’s sake—love each other madly and can’t bear the five-minute drive from our dinner at Bonanza. My...

Still sealed in the gray velvet envelope of night, early morning in the Florentine countryside offers the June insomniac stray, loud cars, merciless crickets, and doomsday frogs. These supplant the earlier nightingales, thrashing a capella, as if lured by the glowworms whose light illuminates an equally desperate vanity. By daybreak, a storm begins; not the...

Satire is a difficult form these days. Reality keeps calling, and raising. Let me tell a story that illustrates the difficulty. Last November, when President Reagan’s Teflon began to wear thin, pundits began to write about how his “place in history” was being jeopardized. My buddy Tim, a historian, casually suggested that a President really...

Several years ago in Paris I was surprised to find young pamphleteers outside the Hotel de Ville (or “Chateau Chirac” as an acquaintance would say) shouting out, “Down with the bearded, sold-out socialists!” When I told friends at home, they seemed incredulous. After Reagan bombed Libya I remember that the people of England and West...

This month I am reporting from London on the recent publication here of what is undoubtedly one of the most important books ever written on the subject of totalitarian expansionism. I offer this judgment because, although the accident of birth and intellectual curiosity have made Soviet Russia a subject of special interest for me, I...

Perhaps you heard something of the furor evoked down here a couple of years ago when it was reported that a speech pathologist in Chattanooga, one Beverly Inman-Ebel, was conducting a class for those who wished to shed their Southern accents. (That’s how the news stories put it. One could as well say, of course,...

My husband, a beef jerky afficionado, tells me that C & I Jerky, Ltd. makes some of the best he’s ever tasted. Ileene Nodland and Cheryl Knutson produce it themselves in Dunn Center, North Dakota, which had 170 residents during the 1980 census and has fewer now. Knutson started out making her special venison jerky,...

In advertising, it’s called weasel type, those tiny bits of typography which explain the nut of the matter (Offer expires on May 31, 1997. Employees of XYZ Corp. are ineligible). So, here goes the weasel type of this discourse. I am not a teacher. Nor am I a mother. Not even a research scientist, a...