“Thou shalt not portray a white male in an heroic light.” Thus reads the first commandment of the politically correct. Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists have been engaged in a drive to destroy American heroes—if they are white males. This was not always a difficult task. Historians from an earlier generation had...
“Ye that make mention of the LORD, keep ye not silence.” —Isaiah 62:6 I am holding in my hands a scatola musicale the size of a matchbox, which somebody gave me the other day as a frivolous keepsake. You can buy one just like it in any souvenir shop in Venice for two, maybe three dollars. ...
The two roots onto which Western Christendom was grafted proposed very different notions about depicting the gods. The Greeks famously made images of Athena and Zeus, always depicting them as man writ large, and were untroubled by this glaring anthropomorphism. Hebrew tradition, on the other hand, said nothing about making or worshiping images of God. ...
A recent phenomenon in the United States is that no one knows any longer to what extent the country, our states, or our municipalities can participate in the display of such traditional religious symbols as crèches, crosses, menorahs, or even the Ten Commandments. Until the last half of the 20th century, no one seemed too concerned...
Iraq is the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the fertile area around and between the two great rivers, the territory between Baghdad, the ancient capital of the entire Arab world, and Basra, over 500 miles away where the great rivers converge as the Shatt-el-Arab before entering the Persian Gulf. Some say Iraq is...
From October 23 to October 26, 2002, all of Russia—and much of the world—was focused on the Dubrovka theater complex in Moscow. A band of Chechen terrorists had seized the complex during a performance of the popular musical Nord Ost, holding a group of about 750 hostages captive as the band’s leader, Movsar Barayev, nephew...
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
Political experts are certain that war with Iraq is on the horizon, though there is some disagreement about how distant that horizon might be. The way the Bush administration and media pundits invoke the words “justice” and “just war” without actually calling attention to the historical criteria for a just war has been disconcerting. The...
“What doth it profit a man if he gain control of the whole world and lose control of his country?” My first encounter with the new, post-national ruling class came in the early 1980’s. I was a young broadcaster with the BBC Yugoslav Service (as it was called then), and my work took me to...
There may be no more pitiful sight than that of tides of impoverished and starving refugees; there may be no greater irony than grievous want in the Third World amidst exploding possibilities in the First. Nearly a quarter of the world’s population lives on less than one dollar per day. More than half survives on...
At the end of every major period of international strife since at least the Seven Years War, the claim has been put forth that a New World Order has finally arrived that makes possible the substitution of commerce for geopolitics and of law for armaments. This view came into its own after the Napoleonic Wars...
As war clouds loom over the political landscape and the propaganda wafts thickly from the major news media, we have to ask: Where does all of this come from? Who is behind the rush to war? Pat Buchanan has utilized a useful phrase to describe the origins of this bloodlust: the War Party. This term...
Saint Augustine did not originally desire to be a pastor. When, in 387, he finally surrendered to the Holy Ghost in the garden of his “philosophers’ estate” in the countryside outside Milan, he intended to follow the example of Saint Anthony and live a life of quiet solitude, separated from the temptations and trials of...
America’s present position is paradoxical. On the one hand, her unparalleled power and wealth are reflected in the astoundingly imperialist “National Security Strategy” unveiled last October, which asserts a right to stop any country “from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.” That America is a...
“As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be; world without end. Amen.” “God granted that the life of this holy man should be a long one, for the benefit and happiness of holy Church, and he lived seventy-six years, nearly forty of them as priest or bishop. In the course of...
As founder of the intellectual tradition of the West, Saint Augustine has one peer: Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Roman of noble antecedents who spent his life in the service first of literature, then of the Gothic kingdom of Theodoric, and always, throughout a life that compassed literary success, high office, and political disgrace, of...
I once knew a lady who ran for governor of the state of Pennsylvania on the promise that, if elected, she would run the state like a family. Unfortunately, she lost the election, so we will never know what that would have been like. (I am tempted to say that it would be impossible to run...
Freedom is under serious assault today. Government takes and spends nearly half of America’s income. Regulation further extends the power of the state in virtually every area of people’s lives. Increasing numbers of important, personal decisions are made by some public functionary, more often than not based in Washington, D.C. Virtue, too, seems to be...
As we look around at the pandemonium that characterizes the circus maximus of our once-great culture, there are few things as striking as the large number of what we might call “disconnected pockets of sanity,” otherwise known as nuclear families. And the fact that they are disconnected means that the sanity is illusory. When it...
Is the Ashcroft Justice Department busily engaged in shredding the Constitution under the cover of September 11? We are, the President tells us, at war, and in war, we are often told, the first casualty is civil liberties. Some feared that this was the case when Attorney General John Ashcroft, in July, unveiled his TIPS...
If constitutional liberties are as old as the republic itself (older if you include the tradition of English common law), violations of those liberties are just as old. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson threw their political opponents in jail, Andrew Jackson pursued a policy of genocide against this continent’s original inhabitants, and Abraham Lincoln unleashed...
Larry Ellison has an idea. The relentlessly self-promoting CEO of Oracle Corp., a Silicon Valley software company famous for its ability to grab government contracts, envisions post-September 11 America as a country where everyone walks around with a “smart card.” Days after the terrorist attacks, the opportunistic Ellison was all over the media claiming that...
Our nation is clearly in the midst of a culture war. The most important battles are not being fought in Washington, D.C., but in our media, churches, schools, civic organizations, youth groups, and universities. Western civilization, as we have known it, and America, as we have known it, are losing. Much of the time, the...
I do not like the word education—especially when it is not only confused with but mistaken for learning. Originally, education in English meant “bringing up.” That is not identical with schooling. A man or woman who “has been well brought up” (alas, an almost obsolete phrase nowadays) suggests something about good manners, mental or physical manners,...
Belgrade’s Tenth Gymnasium was a well-proportioned neoclassical building in a leafy park three miles from the city center. Built by King Alexander shortly before his ill-fated trip to Marseilles, it bore his name until the Partisans’ victory in 1945 and was considered a very good secondary school. Many of its students came from the provinces...
“Dad,” the inquisitive youngster is bound to ask, “where do corn flakes come from?” In today’s economy, where farms are something you drive by on your way to Disneyland, the most common answer might be “Kroger” or “the 7-Eleven” instead of “from the farm, son, from cornfields.” The real answer, which you would most certainly...
Is anyone who thinks, as I do, that “dim sum” is Chinese for “damn soon” or that “sushi” is Japanese for “bait” even remotely qualified to write on food? Actually, I often volunteer unsolicited comments, more or less printable, as the case may be. I have noticed that the most thoughtful people I know prefer...
With former president Bill Clinton settled into his new headquarters on New York’s 125th Street, in central Harlem, the danger for the culinary crowd is that he may now take to hanging out at Sylvia’s, the famous soul-food restaurant barely three blocks away on Lenox Avenue near 126th. For almost 40 years, the family-owned restaurant...
Why don’t y’all try to guess—go ahead—which American region, in its unofficial anthem, celebrates food. Answer? The South. Permit me, Suh: Dar’s buckwheat cakes and Injun batter, Makes you fat or a little fatter, Look away! Look, away! Look away! Dixieland. You see? We have been in the eating business a long time down here,...
A dry snow scouring the Sherman Mountains east of Laramie turned to rain outside Cheyenne and blew in sheets across Interstate 80, from Pine Bluffs to Sidney to Ogallala to North Platte to Kearney to Grand Island to York, Nebraska, and from York south to Geneva, Bruning, and Hebron: 501 miles of deluging rain from a...
Oh I’m packin’ my grip and I’m leavin’ today, ’cause I’m taking a trip California way I’m gonna settle down and never more roam, and make the San Fernando Valley my home. I’ll forget my sins, I’ll be makin’ new friends, where the West begins and the sunset ends. Cause I’ve decided where yours...
When I called Mike Rafferty to arrange a meeting to discuss a possible symposium on the demise of the local community, I had to choose a different date from the one I?wanted because Mike was busy that night. He was boxing at the Spectrum. Like Rocky Balboa, Mike Rafferty lives ten minutes from the Spectrum. ...
I remember a time when the terms “community” and “virtue” had almost disappeared from philosophical discourse. Working on a doctorate in philosophy at Washington University in the mid-60’s, I took a seminar in ethics from Prof. Herbert Spiegelberg, who had written the definitive history of phenomenology. One day, he observed that philosophers no longer even spoke...
In the 1960’s, a fashionable subject of conversation among the Russian intelligentsia was Mikhail Sholokhov’s plagiarism. Sholokhov, it was alleged, had found the manuscript of And Quiet Flows the Don among the personal effects of a certain Cossack, published it as his own, and eventually pocketed the 1965 Nobel Prize for Literature. Just look at...
Peter: “Lord, wither goest thou?” Christ: “I go to Rome to be crucified.” The monastic choir stalls of the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence were occupied not by the hermit-monks of the Camaldolese Order to whom they belonged but by laymen, members of the Platonic Academy. From the lectern, the Latin periods...
Petrarch is often described as the first modern man, and, even before Renaissance painters worked out the rules for perspective, the poet had been able to develop an historical perspective on the past. His decision to climb Mt. Ventoux is interpreted as the first sign of the individual restlessness that bore fruit (much of it sour)...
I once read that Abdala the Muslim, when asked what was most worthy of awe and wonder in this theater of the world, answered, “There is nothing to see more wonderful than man!” Hermes Trismegistus concurs with this opinion: “A great miracle, Asclepius, is man!” However, when I began to consider the reasons for these opinions,...
For pietist Lutheran pastors in America, it was an embarrassment that would not go away. Since the Reformation, it had always been one of the people’s favorite hymns, penned by Martin Luther himself—second only to “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Written in 1541, “Lord, Keep Us Steadfast in Thy Word” had been an anthem—sometimes...
David Brock, scourge of Anita Hill and Bill Clinton, the young man who gave new meaning and currency to the phrase “Arkansas state trooper,” has made a second career of repenting of his years in the conservative movement. He has now retold the story of his disaffection from the movement in Blinded by the Right:...
“School cuts would hurt neediest kids,” the headline in the local Gannett paper proclaimed. With the spring primary just days away, the administration of Rockford School District 205 was urging the public to pass the third education referendum in a row. This one would allow the district to issue $23.5 million in bonds and use...
This little piece requires a head note. Oddly, it is the only thing I have ever written that was honest-to-God censored. I was asked by the Chronicle of Higher Education to write a short opinion piece on the subject of contemporary creative writing courses, etc.—the scene. I wrote this piece, following their guidelines exactly for...
“To the one who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna.” —Revelation 2:17 Around the turn of the 20th century, the hieromonk Arsenios, parish priest of Farasa in Cappadocia, had secretly baptized one of the wives of a Turk living in his Christian village. Soon after, she lay on her death bed, and...
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” —Tertullian The spread of Christianity was marked by a trail of blood, shed by myriad martyrs during the first three centuries of the Christian era. Another trail of blood followed: that of the Christian defenders of the Roman Empire, shed by Arabian Muslims in...
Globalization is remaking the world in ways that will profoundly affect how people do business, govern themselves, and even make war. We may debate what the driving force behind globalization is—capitalism or technology, for example—but there is no doubt that capital goods, services, people, and ideas cross borders with increasing speed, frequency, and ease. Actions...
When the United States government was seeking to retaliate for the terrorist attacks last year, it was not too difficult to name the obvious targets: Afghanistan (of course), Iraq, Somalia, and the rest of the world’s bandit states. Opponents of military intervention could make few effective arguments, but one point that was quite widely raised...
When President Bush signed an executive order on November 13 that authorized the trial of non-U.S. citizens on charges of terrorism before special military tribunals, the response from the political right was almost—though not quite—unanimously supportive. Not only did the attorney general himself enthusiastically defend the tribunals, so did such luminaries as the conservative movement’s...
In Northfield, Minnesota, St. Olaf’s College was celebrating the 17th of May—the day the sons of Norway wrote their constitution in 1814, declaring self-government and independence from Swedish rule. It was 1907, just two years after the Swedes had released Norway and Prince Carl had become Haakon VII. Thirty-one-year-old first-year instructor Ole Rölvaag gave the...
The decline of the Midwest as a cultural force was well under way by the time Russell Kirk was born in Plymouth, Michigan, in 1918. Yankee influence in the region had largely been replaced by a more vibrant German-American culture, and now the United States, in the midst of the War to End All Wars,...
“Free trade,” like “free love,” is a beguiling abstraction that hides more than it reveals. Absolute free trade would be an exchange of commodities between two people without the coercive intervention of a third party. But economic exchange is always embedded in a cultural landscape of noneconomic values, which impose restraints. Blue laws prevent trade...
William Jefferson Clinton mentioned the domestic auto and steel industries a mere seven times in the first two years of his presidency, according to the subject index of his presidential papers. After noting that the auto industry accounted for nearly six percent of the Gross National Product (GNP) in May 1993, President Clinton waited another...