Category: Cultural Revolutions

Chronicles, as the premier journal of real American culture, takes notice, though belatedly, of the loss of two great scholars of American literature.  They were both admirers and faithful readers of this magazine, to which I had the pleasure of introducing them.  I knew and learned from both and like to think that I was...

Does the public stock market actually serve a purpose?  To some free-market zealots, the answer is obvious: The public markets increase liquidity, and this enables fledgling businesses to get off the ground by allowing them access to capital.  Moreover, we can all reap the benefits of capitalism’s “creative destruction” and become a nation of investors...

At 11:30 a.m. on October 10, the Connecticut State Supreme Court legalized “gay marriage,” making Connecticut the third state, behind Massachusetts and California, to sanction the practice.  In a 4-3 ruling that cannot be appealed, because it is based on an interpretation of the state constitution, Justice Richard N. Palmer opined for the narrow majority...

Israel’s outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says Israel will have to give up almost the entire occupied West Bank, including most settlements and East Jerusalem, as the price for peace with the Palestinians.  “What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” he declared—and he was right. ...

Flip-flopper.  Like racist or isolationist, it’s not a word that you’d like to have attached to your name.  In recent years, it has been used to whap the likes of John Kerry and Mitt Romney over the head.  It means that your finger is in the wind, that you are not a Decider, that, like...

John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was surprising, but the surprise pales in comparison to the reaction of conservative Christians, especially Catholics.  In their sudden race to endorse McCain-Palin, they have cast aside any questions about the complementarity of the sexes, or even the late John Paul II’s “theology of the...

We might live in the postindustrial era, but economic booms and busts have not disappeared.  Unfortunately, these days the taxpayers seem to get stuck with the losses. The current crisis results from expanded mortgage lending, much of it financed by subprime loans secured through “collateralized debt obligations” (CDOs) by private investors and the government-sponsored enterprises...

In the May issue, I asked, “Do We Want a Federal Police Force?” (Views).  I pointed out that Congress is passing too many laws that duplicate traditional state criminal laws.  The problem with this redundancy is that federal enforcement, like that at Waco and Ruby Ridge, is usually irresponsible. The latest example of this is...

An understanding of sin is central to our embrace of Christianity and the saving work of Jesus Christ.  Scripture clearly teaches that “the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).  Thus, knowing what sin is and repenting of it are essentials to...

Only one thing would have been more gratifying than watching a filthy scumbag like José Ernesto Medellín wince as he felt the chilling gush of sodium thiopental run into his arm.  That would have been watching him wiggle like a Mexican jumping bean as 2,000 volts of lightning fried him like an Old El Paso...

Last month, two brave British schoolboys were given detention because they refused to kneel down and pray to Allah during a religious-education lesson.  The boys attend classes at Alsager High School near Stoke-on-Trent, situated approximately midway between Manchester and Birmingham.  The local county council has a diversity curriculum that requires children be educated in the...

The American Catholic Church has leaned left for so long that it’s hardly news any more.  This began way back when Cardinal Gibbon overruled Pope Benedict XV’s plea for peace during the Great War and pledged to President Wilson the undying fighting loyalty of millions of American Catholic boys (including my father, to whom Gibbon...

In the last 38 years, Virginia has evolved from being the “Mother of Presidents” to the “Mother of Foreigners.”  That is the upshot of the latest hodgepodge of data from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center.  Now, without reading the study, most anyone could probably conclude that the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.,...

The field of Gettysburg is perhaps the closest thing to a sacred place, a Mount Olympus, to be found in our secular-minded land.  The battle itself contains enough epic material for the admiration, contemplation, and inspiration of a hundred generations of Americans, if there should be so many.  This is all lost on the U.S....

Americans view liberty as a birthright guaranteed by a written Constitution and Bill of Rights.  Feeling overly secure in their liberties, most cannot imagine any branch of the federal government abrogating constitutional rights such as the freedom of the press or of assembly.  These First Amendment guarantees are enshrined in the Bill of Rights in...

Do suspected Al Qaeda terrorists captured in Afghanistan and taken to the U.S.-operated prison at our naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to contest their detention in the U.S. civilian courts?  According to five members of the U.S. Supreme Court, who agreed with an opinion by Justice...

Take one part high fuel prices.  Mix in stagnant wages and high consumer prices generally.  Stir in global uncertainty and an ever-exploding human population.  Add misplaced production and chimera-chasing.  Add to all that the floods of May and June 2008 that inundated much of Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, and you have a perfect storm—at least...

In this space in the June issue, readers learned about a flock of students from the American Studies program at Randolph College who flapped off to the Chicken Ranch Brothel in Nevada to study the profundities of the cathouse.  They also learned about yet another aesthete who believes emissions from the nether regions of the...

Mark Winchell, literary scholar, biographer, essayist, and occasional contributor to Chronicles, passed from this realm in May after a brave two-year battle with cancer.  With four books out in just the last two years and at barely 60 years of age, Mark was just coming into the prime of his productive career.  His official title,...

Ruth Miller Besemer of Boulder, Colorado, and I exchanged letters for several months before we met.  She sent the first in 1999, when The Rockford Institute held the annual meeting of the John Randolph Club in Georgetown.  The Saturday-evening debate topic was: “Resolved: Conservatives in D.C. haven’t done a damn thing.”  To a check for...

Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been in trouble many times in the course of his long and colorful political career. As mayor of Jerusalem, he was suspected of accepting bribes in the “Greek-island affair” involving former premier Ariel Sharon and his son, Omri (who was eventually convicted and jailed for seven months); but the...

Republican partisans’ joy at an estimated 0.6-percent increase in U.S. Gross Domestic Product in the first quarter of 2008 has been diminished by the continued contraction of two key economic indicators used to determine whether a recession has started.  These are non-farm payroll employment (compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics), which peaked in December...

At midday on April 16, a crowd gathered outside the White House to catch a glimpse of Pope Benedict XVI entering the grounds for his elaborate welcoming ceremony.  Supporters of the pontiff—mostly families and people from neighboring office buildings—were sandwiched between an iron fence and angry protesters. The angriest and best organized of these protesters...

As I was downloading oldies onto my computer the other day, I found a classic hit from the 1950’s: “Yakety-Yak” by the Coasters.  Back in the 50’s, every kid in America—white, black, Hispanic, or Asian; native or naturalized—identified with that song. Several assumptions undergirded the lyrics: Mothers and fathers rear children together; they are on...

Wayne Webster’s Rockford abortuary takes the lives of about 35 babies per week.  In that same time frame, however, there are two or three “turnarounds”—mothers who decide at the last moment not to execute their children.  The most likely cause is the doughty band of Christians who gather to pray outside the slaughterhouse on the...

When it comes to understanding the Mainstream Media (MSM), I have two simple rules.  Rule One: Take off 50 IQ points whenever the MSM cover religion, and bump that up to about 100 points whenever the religion is Catholicism. Exhibit A: Some months back, Pope Benedict gave a homily during Ordinary Time restating basic Catholic...

When I read about the carnal and scatological monkeyshines at American universities, I wonder where the American professoriate gets the nerve to call what they impart “higher education.” What it is, of course, is lower education, and a prime example of such comes from Randolph College, a private liberal-arts school in Lynchburg, Virginia.  The school’s...

It was by all accounts reminiscent of the Rev. Dr. King himself and even—dare we say it?—of the Great Emancipator.  Yet whatever its emotive puissance, Barack Hussein Obama’s recent oration on race was reminiscent of King and Lincoln in more ways that one: It was a few threads of truth stitched into a tapestry of...

On March 20, President George W. Bush marked the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war by stating that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power was and always will be the right one.  His view is not that of the majority of Americans, who are citing the high costs in American...

If you want know what’s wrong with higher education, look no further than Gene Nichol, the recently ousted president of Virginia’s College of William and Mary.  First, he banished an iconic cross from the chapel in the school’s Sir Christopher Wren Building, the oldest continuously operating college building in the United States.  Then, he let...

At 3:00 p.m. on February 14, I was sitting in the political-science graduate assistants’ office in DuSable Hall at Northern Illinois University.  Ten of us were chatting, waiting for 3:30 classes. At 3:10, my friend’s cell phone rang.  “Joe just called,” she said after hanging up, her face ashen and her eyes wide.  “He says...

In February, when 52-year-old Georgian billionaire and political exile Badri Patarkatsishvili died at his Surrey mansion, British media wondered if this might be a Georgian version of the Litvinenko affair.  Patarkatsishvili had been a supporter of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s 2003 “Rose Revolution” but had lately been in opposition to the Georgian president, running against him...

For decades, Kenya has been an oasis of peace, compared with her neighbors Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan, and Somalia.  That changed on December 30, 2007. After 24 years of the corrupt presidency of Daniel arap Moi, Kenyans had high hopes when, in December 2002, they elected Mwai Kibaki as their president for the next five years. ...

The watershed U.S. Supreme Court decisions Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, we are told, “empowered women” to control their lives.  In reality, they empowered the Police State and set the U.S. Imperium on a trajectory where it not only could deny the personhood of the unborn but could legally classify whole groups of...

Bobby Fischer, the reclusive, troubled, and often unpleasant chess genius from Brooklyn who single-handedly crushed the myth of Soviet invincibility, died of kidney failure in Iceland on January 17 at the age of 64. Robert James Fischer was born out of wedlock to a prominent Hungarian atomic physicist, Pal Nemenyi, who was involved with the...

As Canadians were preparing for the Christmas season, they were shocked to learn that Aqsa Parvez, a 16-year-old Muslim girl from the Toronto area, was strangled to death by her devout father, a cab driver of Pakistani origin.  It appears her crime was a refusal to wear the traditional hijab when she was not at...

Quite a few years ago (1977, to be exact), a colleague tried to convince me that the best way to make our college conservative was to set up a curriculum and a program in Christian studies that would appeal to conservative Catholics.  There are lots of Catholics who are fed up with the “R.C. lite”...

A nine-year-old boy in Phoenix earned a three-day suspension from the Abraham Lincoln Traditional School for committing a “hate crime,” reports the Arizona Republic.  The boy reportedly used the phrase “brown people” while arguing with another student.  He was then questioned by a detention-room officer—the mother of the offended “brown person”—who demanded to know “why...

Condi Rice had a vision: It was springtime in Pakistan, and love was in the air—which was an ideal time for a chick flick.  From the lady who brought us the Shiite-Sunni Love Fest in Iraq, Fatah-Hamas: Isn’t It Romantic? in Palestine, The Amorous Cedars in Lebanon, not to mention the first season of Democratic...

In November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops held their annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.  Unfortunately, the document they produced, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” is both disheartening and, frankly, politically useless. The bishops tell the reader that “The direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life from the moment of conception until natural death...

On September 25, President George W. Bush spoke at the United Nations to condemn human-rights abuses by the government of Myanmar, siding with Burmese political dissidents.  Throughout October, protests in Myanmar grew more aggressive, and the government backlash became more cruel.  But why is President Bush endorsing regime change now? Since 1988, Burma (Myanmar) has...

A congressional resolution recognizing as “genocide” the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915 collapsed on October 25, when its sponsors—led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)—asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to set the matter aside until “the timing is more favorable.”  The nonbinding resolution passed the Foreign Affairs Committee two...

Nursultan Nazarbayev’s regime in Kazakhstan, a recipient of U.S. foreign-aid funds, is cracking down on religious groups it disapproves of, as the congregations associated with Grace Presbyterian Church discovered firsthand this past August, when the KNB (the Kazakh successor to the Soviet-era KGB) raided churches in Karaganda and Oskemen.  Since then, raids, detentions of church...

If Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton believed raising Cain in Jena, Louisiana, would rekindle that old-time religion, they were sadly and predictably wrong.  They hoped to reprise the glory days of Selma and Montgomery, but the media and most Americans forgot their vaunted march as quickly as its slogans wafted into the Bayou State’s muggy...

The Arlington Group, a powerful association of Christian Right leaders, is, to borrow from the author of the Book of Virtues, picking a pony.  Some ponies, such as Arkansas’ Mike Huckabee, just don’t look like they can make it to the final stretch.  Fred Thompson, on the other hand, could go the distance.  The problem...

The murder of children in the womb in Aurora, Illinois, has been stayed, for the moment.  Planned Parenthood, the company that encourages and equips teenagers to fornicate so that it will have a steady stream of babies to kill (over a quarter of a million per year), began building a 22,000-square-foot, $7.5 million abattoir last...

In Russia’s Ulyanovsk region, the birthplace of Lenin, the regional government has declared September 12 the “Day of Conception,” throwing in a promise of time off work for couples striving to make that day a success.  Such programs have been instituted more frequently since Russian President Vladimir Putin made boosting the country’s birthrate part of...

When the Old Gray Lady finally deigned to take notice of Ron Paul’s presidential bid, it was in the form of a long piece in the New York Times Magazine by Christopher Caldwell, a piece that confirmed the definite feeling of déjà vu I get when I note the energy, the enthusiasm, and the surprising...

When President George W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Mexican President Felipe Calderón met in Quebec in mid-August, they were greeted by news stories that had migrated into the mainstream media from the populist fringe, alleging that the three national leaders were conspiring to create a supranational North American Union (NAU).  Responding to...