Category: Correspondence

The death of exiled former FSB (the domestic-security successor to the KGB) officer Aleksandr Litvinenko in London last November momentarily relegated Britney and K-Fed, Oprah, and Madonna to the second pages of Western tabloids.  It also sparked a frenzy of speculation about who stands behind the apparent murder—or “murders,” since talk of political assassination was...

Public and private interests are joining forces to build a massive transportation “corridor” through the middle of Texas—threatening property rights, wildlife, and the historic landscape of the Lone Star State.  The Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) would be the initial U.S. portion of a complex of highways and rail lines from the interior of Mexico to the...

Over the last decade, the state of Arizona has made ground-breaking attempts at K-12 education reform.  A 1997 law allowing taxpayers to steer a portion of their state income-tax liability toward a student at a private school now provides significant scholarship aid each year to 22,500 of the 54,000 students enrolled in private schools.  With...

Racism is the issue of our time, particularly in Britain, with her legacy of colonialism, and in the United States, with her history of slavery.  Race is the ultimate taboo, and careers, such as that of Trent Lott in the United States or those of various British Conservative MPs, have been permanently ruined by one...

The history of Berlin over the past 16 years—more exactly, since the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989—offers an almost classic example of how wild dreams conceived in a moment of euphoria can so easily collapse into a mood of grudging resignation. Overnight, the divided city, which had previously had two town...

Houston now has a professional soccer team, which is not something I’m especially excited about.  The team’s initial moniker, however, apparently got a rise out of the Bayou City’s “Latino” residents, many of whom, we are told, “only came here to work.”  Not only did these supposedly friendly worker bees get upset, but many of...

The surprise victory of the militant Islamic group Hamas in recent Palestinian parliamentary elections is an ominous warning about the prospect of democratization that is either directly or, as in the Palestinian case, somewhat indirectly imposed from without. Perhaps Ghazi al-Jawar, the former provisional president of Iraq, was correct when he warned about the possible...

It is not easy nowadays even to mention the word conservative in Greece.  Historical factors, as well as the cultural dominance of the left since the restoration of democracy in 1974, have put immense pressure on everyone who is trying to represent the right in the modern Hellenic Republic.  Even when speaking of the ruling...

Last year, an arresting headline on page three of Tokyo’s Daily Yomiuri newspaper read “Japan Heading for Extinction.”  The article bemoaned the contents of a government white paper addressing Japan’s declining birthrate. The average number of babies born to a Japanese woman during her reproductive years dropped to a record low of 1.28 in 2004,...

Cesar Rodriguez, a 27-year-old unemployed security guard, had it in for 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, the daughter of Nixzaliz Santiago, his common-law wife.  After losing his job a few days before Christmas, Rodriguez increased the frequency of his daily beatings of the helpless, undernourished four-foot-tall girl.  Police records indicate that Rodriguez had been beating her for...

When Vasco da Gama’s three battered little ships dropped anchor off Calicut on May 20, 1498, after a voyage of over ten months, they had finally found the sea route between Europe and India so long sought by Portugal’s kings and explorers. Apart from the desire for knowledge, Da Gama’s tatterdemalion mini-armada had come for...

The vociferous and, at times, incendiary uproar that suddenly erupted in early February with the publication in Paris of 12 “satanic drawings,” supposedly caricaturing Muhammad, offered the world one more proof of the extent to which, thanks to radio, television, and computers, our rapidly shrinking planet has now become a global village. It also offered...

As a nonnative from a cold-weather climate, I have observed that there are four seasons in Arkansas’ Delta: warm, hot, scorching, and malarial.  Another way to understand the weather in this part of the South is through the eyes of a ubiquitous inhabitant: the mosquito.  They bite in February; aerial insecticide spraying commences in May;...

Appearances, as we all know (or should know), are often deceptive, just as one’s memory is often fallible and by no means a sure guide as to what one has really and truly observed.  It may be that I was not sufficiently observant when I first visited Moscow in the summer of 2003.  I must...

Spain is a country with strong regional identities.  The central government recognizes four official languages: Spanish, Galician, Basque, and Catalan.  The people in the “periphery” of Spain may refer to Spanish as Castilian, to distinguish it from their own language.  In the Basque country, Catalonia, and Galicia, signs in the regional language are omnipresent.  At...

After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the dike that had held back the military hordes of Asia from Europe collapsed.  Very soon, the European nations realized that the new conquerors were not the bearers of any civilization, even primitive; instead, they were bloodthirsty destroyers, living parasitically on the Christian populations...

It has been more than four centuries since the last time that a German was elevated to the chair of Saint Peter. Pope Hadrian VI (1522-1523) was from Utrecht, a city within the Holy Roman Empire. Before his election as pope, he had been the teacher of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the principal representative of German...

On Saturday, July 10, 2004, my cousin and I drove from Ciechocinek to Czestochowa, to attend a celebration of her grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary. Ciechocinek is a spa and resort town about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, Poland. Before the trip began, she had to stop by the aesthetics studio (a type of spa) she...

The 75th anniversary of the publication of I’ll Take My Stand ought to cause traditionalist Southerners and other Americans to look closely not only at the current state of our society but at their own personal spheres of community, family, and church.  The authors warned that the South was in danger of being snatched from...

Saturday afternoon, my sister-in-law, Carolina, called from Bogotá.  She asked me how we were doing—repeatedly, the way her mother does—then she asked to speak to my wife.  My wife wasn’t home, so Carolina asked me to have her call, since “we have a little problem.” Carolina sounded fine, so I didn’t understand why my wife...

In the 16th century, Spain was the wonder of Europe, with her vast empire in Latin America and the Philippines and her wealthy possessions in the southern Netherlands and Italy.  She came close to defeating and ruling England and Holland and, for a time, annexed Portugal with her colonial empire in Africa, Asia, and Brazil. ...

It is a truism to note that H.L. Mencken, like his great vitriolic predecessor Jonathan Swift, was a thoroughgoing misanthrope.  So perverse was Mencken’s vision of human existence that he preferred to read King Lear as farce rather than as tragedy—since nothing, he was fond of saying, could be more farcical than death.  But if...

Several years ago, when the summer blockbuster Independence Day came out, I was told that audiences cheered the part where alien spacecraft destroyed such Washington, D.C., landmarks as the U.S. Capitol and the White House.  At least some Americans know who the real enemy is and are willing to cheer publicly at cinematic depictions of...

Let us now praise famous Queenslanders, in particular the most famous Queenslander of the lot: Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, who died, aged 94, on April 26.  One of Australia’s most sure-footed and most intuitively brilliant political leaders, Sir Joh, as everyone called him (though he received his knighthood only in 1983, it is now impossible to...

Attempting to make dinner conversation at a May 2004 refugee contractors’ conference, I speculated about the chances of Serbs, now hounded and persecuted in Kosovo, coming to America on the U.S. refugee program.  In the last ten years, the percentage of Serbs in the Serbian province of Kosovo has declined from over ten percent to...

A bill proposed in Turkey that would have made adultery a punishable offense was retracted shortly after its introduction.  Hailed as a decisive move by the European Commission, this resulted in a proposal to open negotiations on the entrance of Ankara into the European Union. This attitude befits the ideology of the fundamental rights of...

Two decades ago, Ronald Reagan committed his greatest foreign-policy blunder: intervening in Lebanon’s civil war.  After Muslim opponents of the bedraggled Lebanese government targeted U.S. diplomats and Marines to deadly effect, however, he “redeployed” U.S. forces to ships offshore and sailed away.  Now, the Bush administration risks sliding back into the Lebanese imbroglio. The bloody...

The applicant for our research fellowship was a likeable physician who spoke with passion about the mind-brain problem.  My professional world is overrun by people who believe that, if we just do enough imaging studies, in which a subject works on some cognitive test while complex machinery detects which parts of the brain are activated,...

Spain, Voltaire once observed (expressing the scorn that many Frenchmen feel for those unlucky enough to have been born on the wrong side of the Pyrenees), is “le pays de la paresse”—the land of laziness.  For a long time, paradoxically, this was part of her charm, part of the magnetic attraction, of the “Byron syndrome”...

In the second half of February, I visited Kosovo and Metohija with a Russian humanitarian team that brought 12 tons of food, medicines, and school supplies to the surrounded Serbian enclaves of Lipljan, Batuse, and Priluzje, where the inhabitants have, over two months, had their electricity, heating, and water cut off by the newly elected...

At Mineview in the Sky, a tourist attraction in Virginia, Minnesota, you can see, with binoculars that cost a quarter to operate, white smoke rising from the top of hills laden with iron ore that are still being mined, while the towns around them sit nestled in the valley below. Three decades ago, no one...

On August 29, 2004, just before my departure from Poland, I attended an important ceremony at the small, historic town of Nieszawa, which lies near the Vistula River, about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, in the Kujawy-Pomorze (Kuyavia-Pomerania) region or Voivodeship (Wojewodztwo).  It was a sunny and rather hot day.  The town, which currently has...

In a strange way, it appears that Adolf Hitler is still ruling Germany.  In the Federal Republic of Germany, the forces of “democracy,” in the form of political parties, make political decisions by implementing the opposite of what they assume Hitler would have wanted.  Those political parties, the governing opposition, are “democratic” because American military...

“If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?”  This old bit of black humor popped into my mind as I drove home from a local college after attending a lecture, entitled “My Long Road to a Global Ethic,” delivered by dissident Catholic theologian Hans Küng.  “It would simply be too coincidental,” I thought...