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The War Against the West
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The War Against the West

“Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.” —Tennyson In our day the mere mention of imperialism is enough to provoke paroxysms of moral outrage. Except in derision, no one any longer dares to speak of the white man’s burden, and few possess the courage to say that it was Europeans who created...

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The Mafioso

According to some theorists, most of America’s woes began with the arrival of big government in 1932. Before that time, so the story goes, liberty was the rule, the work ethic was alive and well, God was in the classroom, and all was well with the world. As with all ideologies, this one presents an...

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Rendering Unto Caesar

“Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: ‘Ireland shall get her beedom and you shall break stone.'” —W. Yeats That some Protestant theologians meshed Christianity with Nazism and became ardent supporters of Hider should surprise no one familiar with the activities of theologians who support a Marxist-Leninism dedicated to destruction of...

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The Celts of the West

The ancient story of early Scotland will not be fully told until much more study has been completed, The face of the land literally is pockmarked with the remains of settlements and dwellings—many unexcavated—raised in an age so remote from our own, we scarcely know the names of the races that inhabited them. Riddles there...

Faith and Empathy
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Faith and Empathy

“Well, I do believe some things, of course . . . and therefore, of course, I don’t believe other things.” —G.K. Chesterton, The Incredulity of Father Brown The progressive turning away from belief in God that characterized Western intellectuals during the 19th century continues, alas, in the 20th. This intellectual shift has often been attributed...

Lame Hands of Socialist Faith
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Lame Hands of Socialist Faith

“You . . . have been borrowing goblins from the capitalist. . . . “ —John Ruskin For numerous well-known Western intellectuals, capitalism versus socialism remains the great dilemma, the principal philosophical and institutional alternative of our times. It is far from self-evident why this should be the case. Why not political pluralism as opposed...

Pleasant Words & Ugly Books
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Pleasant Words & Ugly Books

“Then shall I dare these real ills to hide In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?” —George Crabbe English must be kept up. It rarely is. But what a splendid collection of offenses against it is in D.J. Enright’s book of euphemism. Those who delight in the instructions for Japanese small appliances will here encounter the...

Not a Prayer
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Not a Prayer

“(Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon . . . “ —Samuel Taylor Coleridge Individualism is the question of first concern to the future of the West. The dread argument of the individual case is, I think, the fundamental idea of modernism. Books like those by Turner and Bellah &...

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Nailing Mailer

In 1979 Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize and earned a small fortune with his sympathetic portrayal of murderer Gary Gilmore. Entitled The Executioner’s Song, Mailer’s book devoted 1,050 pages to the last days of the two-time murderer, and only 18 pages to the victims. A year later, 22-year-old Eric Kaminsky, a promising young musician,...

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Us and Them

American diplomats, foreign policy experts, and politicians desperately want to believe that the Soviet leaders are essentially like us and that, fundamentally, they want the same things as we do. The Soviets encourage this kind of thinking with their proposals for disarmament, trade, and detente, and with their laments over the madness of the current...

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Ez and Old VORT

Among Wyndham Lewis’ nearly 50 books are found such classics as Time and Western Man (1927) and the novels Tarr (1918), The Apes of God (1930), and The Revenge For Love (1937). But at the time of his death in 1957, Lewis was probably better known for his persona than for his writings or the...

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Bashing the Baptists

“Who are these people?” someone asks about evangelicals in the early pages of Redemptorama, a book billed as an exploration of Christ and contemporary culture. Despite years of research and her own Southern Baptist upbringing, the author, Carol Flake, offers only caricatures in response to the question. The book is supposed to help sophisticates bewildered...

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Madman in the Dock

When John Hinckley was acquitted in 1982 for his attempted assassination of the President, the verdict galvanized opposition to the insanity defense. Some lawmakers wanted to restrict the use of the defense or even abolish it altogether. In Crime and Madness Thomas Maeder places the insanity defense and the recent challenges to it in historical...

Hillbillies and Rednecks
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Hillbillies and Rednecks

“Taake my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.” —Tennyson Two professors at Mississippi State University, a sociologist and a communicationist, have decoupaged their observations, experiences, and intrapsychic projections into a “phenomenological analysis” of The Southern Redneck. If their work has any redeeming social value, it is as a kind of...

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The Maze of Metaphor

Jacques Derrida has in recent years made himself one of the most influential figures in literary criticism on American college campuses. The movement he has inspired, alternately known as “deconstruction” or “poststructuralism,” asserts that all language is metaphorical and that there is nothing outside the literary text. Following Derrida’s lead, Joseph G. Kronick challenges the...

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Redeemer Novel

Some years ago Ernest Tuveson argued in his landmark study Redeemer Nation that our country’s Puritan background has led it through a series of historical crusades—from Indian wars to Vietnam—to bring righteousness to a corrupt world. It’s an interesting idea, disturbing and perhaps perverse, that deserves more attention than it has gotten. Tuveson’s study leads...

Haunted by Yesterday
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Haunted by Yesterday

“In literature, it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails.” —George Santayana Nothing is more dangerous for the critic than taking a book cover at face value. But when the blurbs compare the author to William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Saul Bellow, the challenge is irresistible. And since these are the claims with...

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Disintering Détente

The Soviet Union has reached the peak of its military power by reducing its economy to a shambles. If it continues to lavish its resources on the military, the economy will further decline, eventually imperiling the military budget. If the Soviets shift investment to the civilian economy, less money will remain for guns. If the...

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Flightless Bird

Many see in Kurt Vonnegut a menace to society. Since the late 1960’s, parents’ groups and school boards in several states have launched drives to keep Slaughterhouse Five and other Vonnegut novels out of libraries and off syllabi. Other observers regard Kurt Vonnegut as a writer of consistent intelligence and integrity—a titan of his age....

In the Land of Cotton
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In the Land of Cotton

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” —Jeremiah When we write of Southern rural life (as when we write of Southern speech, manners, history, or literature) we essay a phenomenon significantly different from that which would normally be suggested were the modifier “Southern” to be replaced by “American.” In...

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The Re-Possessed

“In the end I shall have to renounce optimism.” —Voltaire Among other, more profound things, Dostoevski’s anti-revolutionary novel, The Possessed, is a withering dissection of liberal intellectuals. In its pages, liberals parade as hostile and irresponsible critics of a society that affords most of them a life of comfort and status. They are the “fathers”...

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California Monologue

Author of one previous history of the American West, Richard Batman has attempted in The Outer Coast to provide a history of foreigners in California from the founding of the first mission in 1769 until the attempted annexation of Monterey by a drunken American Navy captain in 1842, which, in Batman’s eyes, marked the end...

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Pastor to the Pariahs

Dramatic conversions happen. F.F. Bruce, the noted New Testament scholar, is not alone in insisting that no one can understand Paul of Tarsus without considering his experience on the road to Damascus. And whether you believe, as Christians do, that he there met the resurrected Christ or not, all admit that he was not the...

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Pedantry and Progress

He wrote one of the most distinctive and original prose styles of his time, paralleling the techniques of his Yankee contemporary, Henry James, anticipating those of Pound and Eliot. But he used that style to write Greek grammars and commentaries on obscure Greek and Latin poets and page after page of “brief mentions,” mini-reviews, of...

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An Untimely End

There used to be two Daniel P. Moynihans. One wrote interesting essays on the foibles and pitfalls of crafting public policy. While seldom mistaken for a rigorous social scientist, this Moynihan had a gift for translating the esoteric findings of the research sociologists into the vernacular. He saw through the pretentions of political hubris and...

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Walden Pond Socialists

Nietzsche’s comment that “the enemy of truth is not lies but convictions” comes to mind while reading An Environmental Agenda for the Future, a collection of statements by leaders of major environmental organizers. In a book of scatter-shot propositions, a few hits are inevitable: the contributors are surely right to criticize misuse of resources and...

Out On a Limb
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Out On a Limb

“Such was that happy garden-state, While man there walked without a mate. . . . “ —Andrew Marvell Kingsley Amis has been practicing the writer’s trade long enough to have produced a full shelf of books. Last year’s Stanley and the Women was not only his 17th novel but a signal that three decades have...

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The Eyes of Adam

Alberto Giacometti was almost a living caricature of The Modern Artist. Such a judgment would strike his biographer as unfair, but it cannot be helped. The popular mind has formed some definite ideas about how an artist behaves: he is above all shabby—wearing clothes he might have slept in, spattered with paint (or caked with...

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Selling Out the Kids

Most parents, especially those with teenagers, know the increasing costs of having children, but in Pricing the Priceless Child, Viviana Zelizer investigates the declining economic value of American children during the past century. Zelizer charts this decline from 1870-1930, noting the simultaneous increase in the sentimental value of children. She notes that, starting in 1860,...

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Getting America Right

American novelists no longer write about America. That, at least, was the judgment of many foreign writers who attended the recent PEN Conference. It would be hard to make the same complaint about our poets. In fact, it is hard to escape the feeling that a good many American poets are engaged in an exploration,...

The Gelded Age
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The Gelded Age

“If the Model Boy was in either of these Sunday schools, I did not see him.” —Mark Twain What do men want? In the gloried 1950’s, Sports Afield and Rod and Gun exemplified a male ethos resting on the quest for game by the primeval hunting band. With Playboy, Hugh Hefner moved the American male...

Love and Death in the American West
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Love and Death in the American West

“Let sixteen cowboys come sing me a song. . . . For I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.” —Anonymous, “The Cowboy’s Lament” The American West has become a place of simultaneous myth and reality. There is a West where zesty young men mounted on noble steeds occasionally rounded up some cattle...

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Stage Props & Program Notes

Eugene O’Neill’s life was a purgatory, as he never ceased informing us. His final plays, those written or revised from 1939 on, leave us with a vision of him plodding at last toward the top of that inverted mountain, the man emerging from his lifelong torments and the artist from his befuddlements. O’Neill is unique...

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Companion to Coleridge

In graceful prose not unworthy of his subject, the distinguished English biographer Lord David Cecil paints an endearing portrait of “St. Charles,” as Thackeray was later to call Lamb. Saint he was, certainly, and sinner, too. The death of Lamb’s mother at the hands of his intermittently mad sister, Mary, caused him lasting grief and...

Shotgun Marriage
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Shotgun Marriage

“The Shadowy Female absorbing The enormous Sciences . . . “ —William Blake Reproductive control and genetic manipulation have been making the headlines for years. One day new developments in birth control herald a freer, happier world for women. The next day, knowledge also gained from those very same developments foretell a future of horror...

Lady and the Vamp
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Lady and the Vamp

“No womman of no clerk is praised.” —Chaucer An old-fashioned historian can be forgiven for feeling a touch of empathy for the bewildered Egyptians upon whom Yahweh emptied the vessels of wrath some 3,500 years ago. The Hebrews’ God plagued the Egyptians for a matter of days, but the stern Minerva who reigns over academe...

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A Fragile Blossom

Feng Jicai’s volume of short stories is truly a remarkable work. It is one of the first publications by a writer in the People’s Republic of China in which the writer has allowed people to be people. The reader does not find the stereotypical characters of proletarian literature in Feng’s stories; instead, these tales are...

The Chapel and the Voting Booth
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The Chapel and the Voting Booth

“I do not yet see the absolute necessity of extirpating the Christian religion from among us.” —Jonathan Swift I am sure it is possible to praise too highly James Reichley’s Religion in American Public Life, but it would take some doing. Reichley, a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution, has produced a superb historical and...

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Affliction and Redemption

Fyodor Dostoevsky is among the pioneers of modern literature. However, like so many of the pioneers—particularly T.S. Eliot—he is acknowledged with ambivalence and even reluctance. Like The Waste Land, Dostoevsky’s works are prized for their subtle exploration of modern despair and alienation. Like Eliot, Dostoevsky is celebrated as a daring technical innovator and a superb...

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Refuting the Planners

Richard McKenzie, a member of the economics department of Clemson University, here assesses the probable impact of new government regulation of the economy under what politicians like to call “National Industrial Policy” (NIP). He sets forth the major legislative policy proposals promoted under this rubric, and he examines their probable effect upon international trade, capital...

Broken Eggshells & Winged Seeds
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Broken Eggshells & Winged Seeds

“Imaging . . . is properly the work of a poet; the [rest] he borrows horn the historian.” —John Dryden Here is an unAmerican story. A young man writes a successful novel. Thousands of Americans, in the oddest places, esteem it highly. So do the most reputable publishers in New York. When he attempts the...

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Fathoming Seas of Red

Unlike the world of democratic politics with its ever-present television cameras and investigative reporters, the world of communism is a realm of mysteries and shadows, understood by few who do not actually hold power. Richard Staar and the 79 regional specialists who have contributed to this encyclopedic volume have performed an invaluable public service by...

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Bridge Out

It is impossible to read Gorham Munson’s The Awakening Twenties without thinking of Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, since both are memoir-histories of the 20’s. Munson, however, is concerned only with 1913-1924. “America will never be the same.” So opined the New York Globe after the official opening of the 1913 Armory Show. . . ....

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True Grit

Tuska’s thesis is that Westerns are not attempts to portray the old West with documentary fidelity, nor do they merely reflect the attitudes of the American public. They are the creation of directors and producers, great and insignificant, men indifferent to historical accuracy and full of their own insights and biases. Furthermore, these insights and...

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Parent Abuse

As tales of child abuse are screamed out on the nightly news, pressures mount for a national policy. Adolescent children are taken away from parents who appear “too strict,” and state after state have passed laws on child abuse that include vague provisions for “mental health.” Parents are beginning to wonder exactly where they stand....

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Iconoclast of the Center

The New Republic claims with some pride to be schizophrenic: it infuriates both the right and the left, while claiming subscribers from the elite of both wings. It has published one of the most damning articles yet on the Sandinista government, while likewise exposing the atrocities of the Contras. And what other magazine offers both...

The Rights of Tradition
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The Rights of Tradition

“Ah, kuinel, you see, Injun man ain’t strong like white man!” —William Gilmore Simms We are approaching an important centenary, though there probably will be little public notice amid the hoopla over the bicentennial of the Constitution. In 1888 Franz Boas joined the newly formed faculty at Clark University to become the first professor of...

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Trouble in Paradise

The origin and nature of the state has been at the heart of political theory from the time of Plato and Aristotle. While speculations about man’s primal innocence in a state of nature cannot be taken seriously as science, they continue to influence political propaganda. Liberal philosophers like Rawls and Nozick continue to write about...

Small-Town Schizophrenia
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Small-Town Schizophrenia

        “I see the rural virtues leave the land. “ —Oliver Goldsmith Garrison Keillor, the writer, has finally made it big. Five years ago a regional cult figure and occasional contributor to the New Yorker, Keillor has now vaulted on to the cover of Time and to the top of the New...

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Uncivil Rights

“It is better that some should be unhappy, than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.” —Samuel Johnson The best way to corrupt a value is to maximize it. That is one of the fundamental lessons of liberalism in the postwar period. Take rights. Push one...