Category: Correspondence

A few weeks ago I went to Munich to see a dentist. The meaning of that experience had not dawned on me in all its vastness until recently. The very word “travel” is repugnant to me. I have never used it to describe my movements, since I always feel I am going somewhere for a...

The other day I got a “Dear Friend” letter from Malcolm Forbes asking for a contribution to the Reagan Presidential Library. It raises all sorts of questions. For instance, does Malcolm Forbes really think of me as a friend? Where has he been all this time? A friend in need is a friend indeed, Mr....

“Directions for Iowa’s Economic Growth” ought to be required reading for every local and state government body, to say nothing of the boys in Washington (the less said about them, the better). Drafted by a University of Iowa research team under the direction of the Iowa Department of Economic Development and the Planning and Research...

Posters around town said there would be a meeting about Nicaragua at the local senior center. The speaker, “Director of the Municipal Art Gallery” in a large California city, was going to show slides taken during her recent two-week tour of Nicaragua. It, of course, turned out to be a propaganda session. She had gone...

By 1921, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, students at Argentine universities had begun to agitate for equal rights with professors and were demanding the same rights for the cleaning staff. It sounds like the spring of 1968 in Paris and Columbia University, but in South America it was old stuff by then. Students...

Calexico is a North American town of roughly 16,000 situated directly on the Mexican border, 120 miles southeast of San Diego, in the warm and sunny Imperial Valley, where agriculture will always be the most abundant business; but Calexico differs from other towns along that extended border in being the suburb of a Mexican city,...

The recent election of the new Chancellor of Oxford University—or was it the prospect of another July undisturbed by fireworks?—reminded me of the letter I received from a Cambridge friend last summer, when I was living in Oxford. I quote it with minor deletions. “Warm greetings to the Latin Quarter of Morris-Cowley, and happy Fourth...

You may recall last January’s events in Forsyth County, Georgia, when a newly arrived Californian announced his presence by attempting to organize a march in Gumming, the county seat, to honor Martin Luther King. That bait wouldn’t tempt an undiscriminating catfish, but a few of the local old boys rose to it anyway, displaying once...

Between now and the turn of the century, 16 eastern and southeastern states will celebrate 200 years of statehood. Here in the hinterlands, seven more states will have their 100th birthday. Then there will be just five state centennials left, with Alaska and Hawaii as late desserts in 2059—when many East Coast states will be...

One New Age guru still on a roll is Rabbi Sherwin Wine. Twenty-three years ago, before his rise, he was an unbelieving rabbi without a congregation. Known for his willingness to violate Talmudic law by marrying Jews to gentiles, this fall Wine became co-chairperson of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews. At the Birmingham...

The day after Christmas this family took off for the National Cheerleaders Association’s High School Cheerleaders National Championship in Orlando, Florida. The National Cheerleaders Association’s High School Cheerleaders National Championship is not the kind of event a parent—this parent, anyway—ever anticipates attending. It is the kind of event a parent discovers herself at because of...

“There is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress.” —Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar Mark Twain, responsible for the foregoing, was being funny. His remark, however, is steadily becoming a little more true and a little less funny. The U.S. Congress, through indirection and guile rather than by overt vote, has managed to give itself a...

Chronicles readers may remember that in my last letter I described the “Russian Style” exhibition in London as a Soviet propaganda ballon d’essai, flown to test Western media response to the new nationalism emanating from Moscow. It is by no means coincidental that such a test should be made here rather than in the United...

Last August marked the 50th anniversary of the first field trials of the Rust cotton picker, an occasion little noted outside the pages of Forbes, where I saw it. Somebody should have made a bigger deal about it. For better or for worse, that machine has transformed the South in my lifetime, and maybe yours,...

It was Homecoming 1986 at Jamestown College in southeastern North Dakota. Scott Westcott, 19, was at the dance. So was Shaun Erickson, 28, a senior who lectures and writes widely about his homosexuality. The room was crowded, and, according to Westcott, his eyes kept meeting Erickson’s across it. Young Westcott didn’t like that one bit....

Academe, n. An Ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n. (from academe). A modern school where football is taught. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) In the spring a young man’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of love. What happens in the rest of the year is uncertain, but in the southwestern...

“More and more, the categories we think by are forms of darkness. Yet we keep using them as if fearful of the deeper darkness we’d inhabit if we had to front this life without them.” —Jack Beatty, “The Category Crisis,” Atlantic (March 1986) An open letter to Jack Beatty, Editor, Atlantic Monthly Dear Jack:     I...

The last speaker ended at 10:30, Saturday night. I was at St. Michael’s College in Toronto for the 50th Anniversary Conference, commemorating G.K. Chesterton’s death. A memorial Mass was scheduled for the morning with Gerald Emmett Cardinal Carter; but as a Biblical and Reformed Christian (that’s evangelical-speak for Protestant), I thought I might leave without...

(I didn’t write this month’s letter. My poker and fishing buddy Peter Donaldson did. Peter’s an Irish Catholic boy from Brooklyn, but a fast learner. After he moved from North Carolina to Occupied Virginia, to take a job in DC, he sent back to the Chapel Hill Newspaper some reflections on what he missed. I...

The Duchess of York wore a blue and black top, with a navy-blue belt, over a black, knee-length leather skirt. The female figure which stood before her was wearing a ball gown consisting of a bodice and skirt of pale eau-de-nil panne velvet decorated with vertical stripes of sequins and lace inserts embroidered with jewels;...

A recent Time article reported an astonishing new find. Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that men are good for women. Actually, there’s more to it than that—what they really found out, or think they found out, is that regular relations and, more specifically,...

I did not mean to harm anyone when I bought a Bachelor of Arts degree in Child Psychology for $100. I meant it to be a bitter joke on myself I was going to hang it up in my room, much as an important man might hang a Playboy cartoon on a wall in his...

I’m sure some readers of these letters are tired of hearing what a special place the South is. So I’ll warn you: I’m going to say it again. And I’m going to quote all sorts of other people who say it, too. Come back next month if you can’t take it. The South is a...

I had the distinct feeling I had seen the book somewhere before. It was almost like the old cinematographic cliche: close-up of the Treblinka torturer’s face in a dream sequence, a faded photograph shot in sepia tones, men running through the courtyard. The title was respectable enough, The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Faber...

In the heartland’s fiercest modern-day shoot-out—farmers versus lawyers and bankers—it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad. Charles Niska, farmer and father of eight, is serving two consecutive one-year sentences in the North Dakota State Penitentiary for illegal practice of law and jumping bail. Niska got into trouble helping his neighbor Richard Schmidt...

To walk along a narrow ridge or cliff path, German-speakers will tell you, you have to be schwindelfrei. The French word vertige exists in English (vertigo), but we would be more likely to say “dizziness.” The German word is for vertige or dizziness der Schwindel, but Schwindel also can mean what it does in English—swindle....

How do I get a grant? You first must get an application. Forget about those grants for which you cannot apply, such as MacArthur Fellowships, which are essentially designed for people already known, which is to say celebrities, or incipient celebrities. Once you get the application, read its guidelines carefully to make sure you qualify...

I grew up in the Volunteer State of Tennessee, so called because of its citizens’ enthusiastic response to the First Mexican War. Maybe growing up there colors my view that wars ought to be fought by folks who want to fight them-and it certainly in creases my estimate of the number of young men who...

“I never save less than $400 on a round-trip ticket Kennedy-de Gaulle,” said the 40ish, balding businessman in the paneled bar of his Manhattan club. “I fly Concorde to Paris once a month. My secretary buys my New York-Paris ticket, which is presently around $1,200, and books my return. In Paris I change dollars at...

Zig Ziglar came to Bismarck recently. (My husband, who doesn’t do aerobics, likes his finger of Cutty before bed, and is understandably paranoid about his decadent life-style, says it feels to him as if Zig comes here once a month.) A lot of people I know went to the performance, and many bought Zig’s books...

The schedule is rather monotonous for a lecturer invited to the big cities where universities are usually located. First comes the airport, then the car with the polite, smiling young man as a guide, then hotel room and restaurant, podium, introduction, photo graphs, the lecture itself-then the whole thing in reverse order the next day....

The gap between Middle Americans and our cultural elite is nowhere wider than on questions of crime and punishment. While activists on the bench and in academia have crafted ever more rights and privileges for those accused and even convicted of crimes, they have given short shrift to the rights and welfare of current and...

Some undigested odds and ends this month. Let’s see—let’s start with some survey research on regional differences, real and perceived. From California comes word that the Stanford Research Institute has come up with a typology of Americans based on their (excuse the expression) life-styles. Not surprisingly, the types are not distributed uniformly across the U.S....

In 1973, at the tag end of the riots and disruptions of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, he ventured into print with a small volume entitled This Beats Working for a Living: The Dark Secrets of a College Professor. He did this under the pseudonym “Professor X” not to hide his identity (this he...

The orthodoxy of Reason is proclaimed, archconservative turned archliberal Garry Wills once wrote, and it will have its inquisitors. He ought to know. Wills perfectly represents a new breed of college Utopians who, losing their power to implement their latest brainstorms on a public suspicious of statist panaceas, have turned their collective energies inward, hoping...

In his provocative book Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver offered some poignant observations regarding modern times. Western man, he wrote, has fallen prey to a “falsified picture” of the world, characterized by materialism and an egotism which assumes that “man’s destiny in the world is not to perfect himself but to lean back in sensual...

Right now, down here, we seem to be experiencing an influx of Northern migrants. There are so many of them, and misunderstanding is so frequent, that I fear a new wave of sectional hostility may be shaping up. I offer as evidence the fact that some of my less tolerant brethren have taken to referring...

When I undertook a study of the ACLU, I had no idea that the politics surrounding my investigation would prove to be as revealing as the research itself. Maybe more so. My first taste of the politics of the ACLU came during an interview with Aryeh Neier, past executive director of the ACLU. The interview...

July 4. There’s a sad little cluster of peeling white bleachers, but they face the sun. Most locals elect to sit on a blanket on the hillside opposite, where the view is great in spite of the dust. To keep the blowing grit down, a tractor and sprayer work the arena to a perfect moistness;...

We were ambushed last Christmas Eve by a gang of politicians disguised as Presbyterian clergy and elders. The scene was a sanctuary; the occasion a candlelight service. The weapons our assailants used were so subtle: newly printed orders of service with the lyrics to all those familiar Christmas hymns set forth where they were to...

A friend of mine was having a theological discussion with his cleaning lady one day (people do that sort of thing in the South), and the subject of the End of Time came up. They agreed that the signs are all in place, and that it must be coming soon, if the Bible is to...

1. Fargo, North Dakota—Not long ago, in a city far, far away from almost everything, there was founded an abortion clinic called the Fargo Women’s Health Organization. A little later came an antiabortion counseling center, which its supporters named the Fargo-Moorhead Women’s Help and Caring Connection, Inc. The abortion clinic obtained a temporary injunction and...

The established church in Washington didn’t know what to make of Billy Graham. By “established church,” I don’t mean the main-line Protestant churches: They were too busy trying to convert their churches into instruments of Democratic foreign policy to care very much about religion. The only established church that counts in Washington, as everyone knows,...

I first visited Morocco in January 1943 as a young officer affected, with others, to the Casablanca Conference; it was considered sack time, after sterner service in the Western Desert, so called, or Libya. Originally it was to have been between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, but Uncle Joe, as both called the Russian dictator, sulked...

An article I read lately informs me that the Southern accent is endangered: the “post-vocalic r,” the absence of which has heretofore characterized most Southerners’ speech, is creeping in, especially in middle-class circles, and especially among women. Ordinarily I stand up for schoolmarms—a genuinely endangered species, there-but if they’re behind this revolting development, I say...

North Dakota—the last place most people ever think of-makes the national news from time to time, usually as part of a survey or study. Sometimes the results surprise those of us who live here, but mostly they don’t. For instance, studies publicized in the past year indicate that we’re the state lowest in stress, that...

A new anti-alcohol campaign has been launched in the USSR on two fronts—one of administrative imposition of measures, sometimes very severe, and one of ideological justification for those measures. This twofold approach is fully understandable because the Soviet system is based on ideological dogmaticism, and any political or social campaign, as well as any important...

Revolutions attempt to give new meaning to life. Sometimes changing the definition of words is part of the attempt to change reality. At other times, reality changes first. Nowhere does the traveler have more old words with new meanings than in revolutionary Nicaragua. To help those whose first days in the country are as confused...

A pathologist who recently moved from Vermont to North Carolina has written an article in the American Journal of Forensic Sciences about the old Southern custom of lying in the road. The good doctor was apparently unacquainted with this practice, and he was upset to discover that every couple of weeks, on the average, one...

I try to be a calm and charitable person. But just when I have some of my smaller base urges under control—my flippancy, my latent cynicism—I trip in some new droppings of those sincere, well-meaning U.S. citizens whose rhetoric can’t be distinguished from the Kremlin’s, and am freshly undone. This time the Boy Scouts and...