Category: Correspondence

After September 11, the word blowback was frequently heard.  It is a CIA term describing operations that come back to haunt the agency (e.g., Afghanistan).  Unlimited immigration has its own form of blowback: people like Chai Vang, who, on the afternoon of November 21, 2004, shot eight deer hunters in the northwoods of the Indianhead...

It was one of those winter days in Texas that seem as gray as the surface of the moon and about as hospitable.  It’s cool outside, so you wear a jacket.  Inside, it’s stuffy.  I’m wearing a coat and running the fan at the same time.  You can’t quite get comfortable when it’s like that. ...

Last April, Claude Imbert, editor in chief of the moderately conservative weekly Le Point, dared to make an astonishing mea culpa.  In a minor masterpiece of melancholic irony, he confessed the awful truth that he was a “liberal”—which, in present-day French parlance, means someone who believes in free enterprise as a necessary antidote to socialistic...

In 1968, George Wallace said that there wasn’t a “dime worth’s of difference” between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.  Implicit there was the suggestion that Americans were not satisfied with echoes and preferred choices.  As it happens, Wallace was the last third-party presidential candidate to win Electoral College votes.  Besides 14 percent of the popular...

It was quiet at Drea’s Tavern on St. Patrick’s Day.  It might seem unusual for an Irish bar to have so few souls stop in the third week of March, but there were reasons. “It’s tough to have it during the middle of the week,” bartender Larry Drea said.  “So few people can get time...

Ciechocinek lies about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, near Torun, the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus, in the Kujawy-Pomorze (Kuyavia-Pomerania) region.  It is a spa and resort town of about 14,000 permanent residents, known for its unique titration towers—large wooden structures with thick layers of bramble, through which water from nearby salt springs is filtered into...

On February 22, an article in London’s Sunday Times reported on a survey of white British converts to Islam.  The survey was conducted by Yahya (formerly Jonathan) Birt, the son of former BBC director-general Sir John Birt.  Having examined the 2001 census figures, Birt concluded that there were around 14,200 white converts to Islam in...

Many people fear that there will be a violent conflict in Britain with the Muslims.  They are wrong.  Al Qaeda may commit the most appalling atrocities in the United Kingdom, as it has done in New York and Madrid, but the coming struggle will not be a violent one.  Most of the Muslims living in...

A visitor to Prague in the immediate aftermath of the Czech Republic’s formal entry into the European Union will find few outward signs that something rather momentous has taken place.  Your documents are still checked at the border crossing as you drive into the country from Germany; the koruna (crown) is still the legal tender;...

One of the sights that most amazed me as I approached the center of Moscow for the first time was a huge poster, stretched across the flat rooftop of a large building not far from the Kremlin, boldly advertising PHILIPS in large letters that needed no further explanation.  Not to be outdone by the famous...

The Catholic Church as a whole does not support illegal immigration, at least in principle.  However, an increasing number of clergy and prelates, especially in Italy, do grant de facto support to illegal immigration.  For example, the bishop of Caserta, Msgr. Raffaele Nogaro, was one of the first high-ranking prelates to support a protest by...

At 6:07 A.M. on May 29, 2003, in a BBC Radio broadcast, reporter Andrew Gilligan commented on mounting criticism of the Blair government’s rationale for going to war against Iraq.  Citing an anonymous “official” involved in the preparation of the Joint Intelligence Committee dossier used to justify the military campaign, Gilligan said that [The dossier]...

Peter Hollingworth was born in 1935.  After completing his national service, he joined the Anglican ministry, serving both at the parish level and in philanthropic roles.  He spent a quarter of a century helping to run a leading Australian charity, Melbourne’s Brotherhood of Saint Laurence.  Appointed Anglican archbishop of Brisbane in 1989, he was named...

When the French historians of our epoch apply their magnifying glasses to the momentous developments of the first two months of this year, most of them, I think, are likely to conclude that the decisive factor leading to the historic National Assembly vote of February 10—when a massive majority of 494 deputies, compared with only...

When you visit a foreign capital for the first time, sooner or later you are likely to be asked the question: “What do you think of our country?” or “What is your impression of this city?”  In St. Petersburg, which I had visited in May, I had a ready answer: Everything there (the worst as...

This is the story of a real Texas family.  Locations and names have been changed to protect the family’s anonymity. Notes from a casual conversation between office coworkers: He: “What are you gonna do this weekend?” She: “Host a family reunion.” He: “How many will be there.” She: “466.” He (surprised at size and exactness...

At a quarter of nine in the morning, we climbed into our four-wheel-drive pickup where the new road ends at Llanada Grande.  Until this year, a flight to its unpaved airstrip or a two-day ride by horse from the automobile road was the only way to get there—and that was after a couple of hours...

Following the Danish rejection of the euro in September 2000 and the Irish rejection of Nice in June 2001, the Swedes have rejected the euro by an overwhelming majority, despite the “yes” side having outspent the opposition by more than five to one. For the first time in decades (possibly in centuries), the Swedes did...

On the day my Brazilian student gave me the kind of reverent statements about Nelson Mandela that I would expect of such a fierce socialist, he also gave me an interesting history lesson.  He reminded me of the coup that had led to 21 years of military rule in Brazil and said that, since the...

At 11:30 A.M. (CST) on Thursday, November 13, 2003, Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was removed from office, and the will of the people of the sovereign state of Alabama was thwarted by a unanimous vote of the nine-member panel of the Court of Judicial Ethics.  In deciding Glassroth v. Moore,...

I have before me, as I write these lines, a handsome white envelope, marked in pale-blue characters with the six-pronged, anchor-fish-hook-crown emblem of this once imperial and still maritime city, which was offered to me by a friend as I was leaving St. Petersburg.  Inside, against an elegant dark-blue background illuminated by six colored pictures...

A few years ago, sitting on the floor of the U.S. House with my friend Rep. Jim Walsh of Syracuse, I said of the member who was speaking: “Curt’s dyed his hair.” Jim looked at me, very seriously, and said: “Curt’s dad is here?” People who grew up in East Tennessee, as I did, are...

“The careless maintenance from year to year, in this, the capital city of the world, of a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice, a breeding place for the hulks and jails, is horrible to contemplate.” —Charles Dickens, the Daily News, March 13, 1852 When Dickens wrote about the “ragged schools” that so pitifully...

Anybody who has ever watched a home video knows how painful is the passing of unedited time.  No matter what or who is the subject of the exposition—sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, deep conversation, one’s own or other people’s children, Osama bin Laden—time in the raw is all but unbearable.  Clearly, it is only through...

Just lay your hardware on the table, cowboy, and keep them hands up high. Last Sunday, I bumped into Ron at the hardware store. In the central Midwest, where I live, it’s not unusual to meet an old friend pushing his cart full of home repairs, especially on a Sunday.  True Value and Ace are...

I became aware of it as I was walking our dog in the neighborhood around our new home in Arkansaw, Wisconsin: the utter silence around me under the shroud of a clear winter’s nighttime sky.  The darkness on the edge of town where my home is located underscored the reasons we had chosen to live...

Vanity plates, I once heard—vehicle registration numbers, in other words, that are believed to hold meanings or to pose riddles, in the pedestrian minds of idle onlookers and fellow motorists stuck in traffic—often cost many times more than the cars to which they are attached.  This is good news of sorts.  For, however pitiful it...

Returning to a city you once loved is always a perilous experience, for it is so easy to be disappointed—as happened to me several years ago when I returned to Venice, a seaborne city I had not seen for more than 40 years.  How can anyone be disappointed by Venice?  My answer had little to...

Suppose you are tired of hearing about roulette.  Suppose the very thought of gambling, despite the metaphorist’s efforts to depict it as the great commonwealth of epochal disillusionment and hence universalize the experience, strikes you as tedious.  Suppose you are the sort of man who insists that the only thing duller than watching people take...

Firearms.  A single word describes an almost infinite number of individual items and has the power to polarize an entire world.  I have a personal stake in the debate.  I own firearms and shoot not only for pleasure but on a competitive level.  Why am I bringing this particular fact to light?  Because I live...

Conservatives rightly honor George Washington, but why should any conservative so much as like Washington, D.C.?  The answer seems as perplexing as the desire of a tourist to buy an “I Love D.C.” T-shirt from one of the Third World vendors on Capitol Hill.  Tell me, Mr. Smith of Heartland, U.S.A., does wearing red-white-and-blue schlock...

In the week before English schools closed for the summer, three educational news items grabbed the national headlines.  This is not especially remarkable in itself: English education has been in a state of revolution for years, and unsettling stories that reflect the unsettled state of our universities, colleges, and schools are featured almost daily in...

It has been argued that, of all human deeds, only the act of conception is selfless, since, for the briefest of instants that consummate it, neither the man nor the woman ever thinks of himself or herself, but always of the other.  And it can further be said that this is precisely where our lifelong...

During my first semester as a graduate teaching assistant, I was fired from my job at a coffee shop for mv inability to act phony. Anyway, this is what I suspected my particularly phony employer meant by a “bad attitude.” I quickly found that, despite the incredibly high taxes in Illinois, my state-university stipend was...

Living in Italy, as I have done for some years, may result in an incremental loss of the vivid sensation, in my view all but indispensable in a writer, that the world as a whole is a barbarous place.  It is then that I feel I must go back to London, to immerse myself afresh...

I shouldn’t have been surprised; I’d heard similar stories from my wife.  But the more dramatic stories had always involved someone I didn’t know.  This was a seven-year-old girl giving an eyewitness account at the dinner table.   “The guerrillas came to Aunt Lucy’s house and told her to fix supper for thirty people,” my...

It is an old truism, so ancient that it can probably be traced as far back as Aristotle, that politics is not an exact science.  Indeed, we could say of it what Napoleon, who knew a thing or two about politics, once said with admirable concision of the Art of War: that it is “tout...

Like the flea-market buyer of an atomic clock that is supposed to keep perfect time until the year 8021 but breaks the next day, the poet player straddles the gnostic frontier between infinite skepticism and absolute faith.  On the one hand, it appears that the buyer’s skepticism is justified, because he’s been swindled.  Look here,...

As the War on Terror drags on, it appears that immigration policy remains a constant, while its interpretation changes like spring fashions in Paris. An Englishman once quipped that a diplomat’s job is to lie for his country.  Blunt truths aside, a diplomat’s role might also be to further his nation’s interests in—and manage relations...

I was born and grew up in Washington’s rural Ferry County, in the northeastern corner of the state.  In 2000, Republican Sen. Slade Gorton was narrowly defeated by ex-Democratic Congressman Maria Cantwell, who spent huge sums of money and yet carried only five urban counties in and around Seattle.  The remaining 34 counties went to...

“I simply find it hard to believe,” a Moscow friend of mine yells into the telephone a respectable number of minutes before asking me to lend him some trifling sum just this once, “that, with everything going on in London, roulette is all you can write about!”  He is young, an actor, insubstantially hopeful as...

The present rift between the United States and Europe on the war in Iraq has overshadowed widening divergences in other realms.  One of these is the attitude toward crucial life issues; whereas the Bush administration is often reprimanded by antilife groups for such initiatives as the ban on partial-birth abortion, the European Union is busy...