I had taught in private schools for years, but I hesitated before entering the classroom to teach my first lesson in the state sector. I stopped a colleague in the corridor and asked him for advice. Should I expect the children to fall silent and stand behind their desks when I walked in? Thinking I was...
It was in the autumn of 1960, after our Plebe Summer and the test of “Beast Barracks,” that I first heard about the revisions that the West Point academic curriculum had recently undergone, which would be experimentally applied to our incoming class of some 800 men. Colonel Lincoln’s Social Science Department, as it was presented...
Toward the beginning of De Caelo (On the Heavens), Aristotle makes the well-known remark that “the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold”—or, as it is sometimes phrased, “a small error in the beginning leads to a large error later on.” We can easily see that this is true, whether in...
“How much power Congress has to block Supreme Court consideration of the constitutionality of its laws is an open question.” This, the Washington Post said in a September 23, 2004, editorial, is “somewhat surprising.” The Post shouldn’t be so astonished, for the real surprise is that judicial supremacy—the doctrine that the Court interprets the Constitution...
The severity of the ongoing decline of U.S. manufacturing has placed our prosperity and national security in jeopardy. A principal cause of this crisis is the federal tax code, which currently imposes multiple layers of progressive taxation on U.S. goods. The result, as many economists acknowledge, is crippling: a double taxation of savings for investment...
In all Eastern Orthodox Churches, this troparion or prayer is spoken or sung frequently in worship: “O Lord, save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance. Grant victories to the Orthodox Christians over their adversaries; and by virtue of Thy Cross, preserve Thy habitation.” This ancient prayer was, one might say, a “national anthem” that was...
“Likewise also the chief priests mocking said . . . Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross that we may see and believe.” I have been a citizen of the sovereign state of California for most of my life. I can guarantee you, Alta California is not merely a result of the...
Nelson Head, a boy in a story by Flannery O’Connor, is reared in the rural South, with little sign of education and in obvious isolation. Yet the boy is arrogant to the point of impudence, because he was born in the city. To cure him of this, his grandfather takes him into the city, only...
In “A Mirror for Artists”—his contribution to Agrarianism’s classic manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, published in 1930—Donald Davidson attacked what he called “the industrial theory of the arts.” According to this Maecenas concept, industrialism can be counted on to create an artistic renaissance in which not the wealthy classes only but the plain people will...
The recent U.S. recession, if judged by its effect on total employment, was the shortest and mildest of the post-World War II period. In the six months from the peak of July 1998 to the low of January 1999, employment declined by only 1.43 million workers, and, by May 2004, 7.5 million additional workers were...
According to most prominent Democrats, the United States is being seriously hurt by the conservatives running Washington today. While their allegations about the damage being done by those in power may be plausible, what warrants skepticism is the premise behind the allegations. Do those whom the Democrats criticize deserve to be called “conservatives”? Given their...
For a political reporter looking for a good story, a national convention has become a pretty barren field. Journalists typically just enjoy the expense account, skip most of the scripted, focus-grouped speeches, and listen instead to Jack Germond or David Broder reminisce about the Taft-Eisenhower floor fight of 1952 or the Chicago riots of 1968. ...
How did the Texas Republican Party, which was in the forefront of the battles to win the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980, become a wholly owned subsidiary of Karl Rove and George W. Bush? Today, the Republicans in Texas control every statewide elected office, yet...
I went into the 2000 presidential campaign an enthusiastic supporter of Pat Buchanan’s bid for the White House as a third-party candidate. I emerged more convinced than ever that Buchanan would have made an outstanding president but skeptical that a serious right-wing party will be able to emerge, at least in the short run. I knew...
A nationwide initiative has been quietly in the making since 2002. Conceived in Texas, apparently with President George W. Bush’s enthusiastic blessing, there are now some 27 sites around the country piloting various parts of it. Nationally, however, the proposed legislation earned barely a blip on the radar screen—the project is so hush-hush that two officials...
At the time of Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing, the French Revolution still loomed over minds and, with it, memories of a bloodbath and of a new kind of tyranny. The American Revolution seemed to offer grounds for rosier hopes about democracy. Convinced that there was no turning back to the old days, Tocqueville set about...
A few years ago, I was talking about Timothy Dwight to an audience of people old enough to appreciate both his Christian orthodoxy and his old-fashioned patriotism. When I mentioned Dwight’s passion for farming and his devotion to agriculture as a way of life, a man from Dwight’s adopted state of Connecticut informed me that there...
On July 19, three days before H.R. 3313 was debated, the ACLU issued notice of an “Urgent Briefing” entitled: “How the Marriage Protection Act (H.R. 3313) Will Harm Civil Rights, and Violate the U.S. Constitution.” The flyer explained: “The bill would shut the federal courthouse doors—including the door to the Supreme Court—to an entire group...
What could a world-famous multibillionaire Hollywood star like Mel Gibson have in common with an unknown, cash-strapped, freelance journalist based in Rome? Virtually nothing, it would seem. Yet there is a common denominator: We are both Catholics and cherish the traditional Latin Mass, the primary liturgy of the Church before its post-Vatican II transformation into...
Michael Moore, the leftist director of Fahrenheit 9/11, got one thing right when he proclaimed at a June 24 press conference that, despite the Republican control of the White House and Congress, America is liberal. It is a fact. The Republican Party, the only home conservatives have at election time, does not remotely resemble the...
According to a recent front-page story in the New York Times, the latest innovation of a particularly ambitious segment of the upwardly mobile American middle class is the replacement of the old-fashioned summer camp with getting-into-college camp. In proportion as the Times is ignorant of One Big Thing, its editors are highly knowledgeable about many...
Every school has a playground for its pupils; English schools provide a playground for politicians, too. Children seek security, regularity, and continuity: The games they play in the schoolyard observe rules that do not change. Change, though, is the contemporary politician’s reason for existence: He seeks not to hold fast to that which is good...
“No Child Left Behind”: That poll-tested slogan is the centerpiece of an artfully designed, meticulously implemented p.r. campaign designed to portray Texas as a hotbed of educational reform and achievement. Certainly, the Texas accountability system has put some focus on teaching basic literacy skills to low-income children who may have been ignored in decades past. ...
As far back as the 1970’s, shortly after the feminist movement was launched, it was estimated that as many as 30 million American women were taking tranquilizers. That was almost half of the female population at the time. In 1975 alone, more than 103 million prescriptions for tranquilizers were written. By the 1980’s, prescription levels...
“For more than two millennia, Afghanistan has been at the crossroads of civilizations and a major contributor to world culture,” declared the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2003. Exactly what Afghanistan has contributed to world culture is not so clear, but the desperately poor, primitive, war-torn state is important in another way. ...
Asked when he became so obsessed with voting, the antediluvian Professor Farnsworth on Futurama replied, “The very instant I became old.” Politicians know only too well that Americans 65 and over vote at twice the rate of 18- to 34-year-olds. So what “senior citizens” want, they usually get. What they want now are cheap drugs...
Vladimir Putin reacted swiftly to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s criticism of Russian democracy following the Russian president’s reelection on March 14. The exchange indicated increasing tensions in U.S.-Russian relations, tensions that may have as much to do with the Bush clan’s business interests as they do with the geopolitical interests of the two...
Years ago, when we were very young and contributing promiscuously to the reviews departments of various intellectual publications, a misguided editor sent me a review copy of a leftist rant by an author whose name I have long since banished from memory, while clearly recalling the title. It was The Dying of the Light—taken, of...
When family and culture are under constant attack, there sometimes seems to be no greater enemy than the American Civil Liberties Union. Yet, when Washington is busy expanding the welfare/warfare state, sometimes only the ACLU seems willing to confront Leviathan. What is someone who loves both liberty and community to do? There is no reason...
In his autobiography, A Season For Justice, Morris Dees describes his 1967 epiphany in snowbound Cincinnati. Dees was, at the time, a millionaire 31-year-old lawyer, salesman, and publisher. While he had “sympathized with the Civil Rights Movement,” he “had not become actively involved.” By the time he arrived in Chicago, however, he was determined to...
At the tail end of the Russian Revolution, Lenin mocked some Mensheviks for protesting that they were not permitted to express their views in public: “Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly ....
Critics have castigated the Bush administration’s nation-building venture in Iraq as a manifestation of U.S. imperialism. That is an apt description of the Iraq mission, as well as the ongoing missions in Bosnia and Kosovo. America’s nation-building bureaucrats are not pursuing just any kind of imperialism, however: It is a distinctly left-of-center variety. As the...
As I write, Washington has just been subjected to a weekend of left-wing protests that even the conservative-oriented Washington Times estimated brought 500,000 demonstrators to the nation’s capital. The March for Women’s Lives, with its shrill advocacy of abortion, overshadowed the antiglobalization rally protesting the meetings of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and G-7...
Last year, when the Washington Post’s Michael Kelly was killed in Iraq, an anonymous contributor to the leftist web network Indymedia announced the sad news with the tasteless headline “WP Nazi columnist bites the Iraqi dust.” Word spread quickly, especially after Glenn Reynolds, the hawkish proprietor of the widely read InstaPundit.com, declared that “the Indymedia...
From pro-war to antiwar, from uncritical acceptance of government pronouncements to principled skepticism, the American media’s perspective on the war has veered drunkenly from one extreme to another. They not only trumpeted the lies put forth by the War Party but gave them credulous and even solemn attention, then turned on a dime and descried...
Mark Steyn once told me a revealing story about Conrad Black’s “conservative” Canadian national newspaper, the National Post. It seems star columnist David Frum had ventured this evaluation: “The Post has a problem. It was started to save Canada, but Canada isn’t worth saving.” Ah, the authentic voice of the Canadian neoconservative! Or, as English...
If you are looking for a reason to vote for Ralph Nader, the way both parties are handling the “gay marriage” issue should give you lots of data. John Kerry, when asked his opinion of “gay marriage,” looks like a dog getting a bath, as Chris Hitchens puts it. Kerry says he personally opposes “gay...
Wisconsin Highways 2 and 53 converge in the uplands east of Superior. From here, you see Duluth climb a hillside of 1.1-billion-year-old rock that geologists call “the Duluth Gabbro Complex.” Nearer still, Superior, Wisconsin, my hometown, sprawls back from Lake Superior, the Great Sweetwater Sea, as though, like the author of this reminiscence, unsure of...
Freedom of speech is a good thing. It is one of those very rudimentary good things, however, like sewage disposal and ballot voting, that civilized societies impose on uncivilized ones when engaged in the business of nation-building. Civilized societies, taking freedom of speech for granted for themselves, have always delighted in that pearl of great...
What the Europeans call America—that is, Canada and the United States—was fostered by what we usually refer to as Europe. If men and women had not left the Old World, there would not be any New World as we know it. Hence, any investigation into the relationship between Europe and America must begin with an...
Over the course of the last millennium, the populations of Europe (including Russia) and its Western offshoots (including the United States) grew explosively. Fueled by the agricultural and industrial revolutions that they pioneered and the raw materials of the New World that they settled, combined European-derived populations grew from less than one sixth to one...
Studies have established that identical twins separated at birth exhibit very similar physical, psychological, and biochemical traits, regardless of the environment in which they grow up. They will have similar voices, gestures, tastes, incomes, professions, wives—and similar diseases. A twin adopted by an Italian firefighter from New Jersey and his brother reared by a Jewish...
Last November’s “Rose Revolution” in the Caucasian republic of Georgia made political bedfellows of an unlikely couple: George W. Bush and billionaire “philanthropist” and global meddler George Soros. The apparent cooperation between the Bush administration and Soros in backing the ouster of President Eduard Shevardnadze seems all the more bizarre in light of Soros’ stated...
More than three years have passed since then-treasury secretary nominee Paul A. O’Neill made one of the first of his now-famous public exposés. To the smug applause of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee and muffled chortling, he boldly exclaimed during confirmation testimony that he was not planning simply to reform the corporate income tax; he...
On April 15, U.S. taxpayers will pay the last installment on their duty to government for 2003. The bill for federal, state, and local government totaled a staggering $3.3 trillion, of which one out of every seven dollars was in the form of “buy now, pay later” deficits, principally the federal one. Federal spending accounted...
We can cut the deficit in half if Congress “is willing to make tough choices,” says President George W. Bush. We are doomed. Not that President Bush intends to make tough choices: His policy is borrow and borrow, spend and spend. When Bush took the oath of office, the Congressional Budget Office projected a cumulative...
For over a decade, the Roman Catholic Church has been in deep crisis over the issue of sexual abuse by Her clergy. That some priests had molested or raped children was indisputable, but just how many had offended? The numbers are more than a simple matter of statistical curiosity. While everyone agrees that “one case...
The personal saving rate in the United States is alarmingly low. The average person saved about nine percent of his disposable (after-tax) personal income in the mid-1980’s, about five percent in the mid-90’s, but only about two percent so far this decade. These very low rates of saving restrict investment, which, in turn, considerably retards...
From Genesis to Revelation, by Way of the New Yorker At the beginning of 1999 . . . my wife Cathleen Schine, announced that she no longer wanted to be married to me. She had to leave, she had to get away for a new life, for she had mysteriously changed in her affections ....
When my daughter, Katie, was in the fifth grade, her grammar school conducted a week-long series of tests inspired by the White House to promote physical fitness for schoolchildren. Children who completed the tests with passing marks—the standards for passing were not high—received a certificate from the President. The kids ran, jumped, and stretched, and...