Category: View

Bodie, July 1881—The early morning hours found deputy constables Richard O’Malley and James Monahan patrolling the streets of the mining town of more than 5,000 residents in mountains immediately east of the Sierra.  Bob Watson and George Center happened by.  A young miner, Center was “quiet when sober,” said the Daily Free Press, “but when...

Americans have been captivated by the February incident in Sanford, Florida, that resulted in the death of Trayvon Martin and the eventual arrest and charging of George Zimmerman.  If the case could be resolved today, Trayvon Martin’s family would still be without a son, George Zimmerman—even if exonerated—will never live a normal life, Sanford Police...

Most retrospectives take the Swinging Sixties, and more particularly Swinging London, on their own terms.  “Society was shaken to its foundations!” a 2011 BBC documentary on the subject shouted.  “All the rules came off, all the brakes came off . . . the floodgates were unlocked. . . . A youthquake hit Britain,” and so...

“A crocodile has been worshipped,” wrote John Taylor of Caroline, “and its priesthood have asserted, that morality required the people to suffer themselves to be eaten by the crocodile.”  Such was his final judgment on the central government of the United States and the advocates of its power.  This prophecy, if such it may be...

It has been seven years since Sam Francis died.  But the years since his untimely death merely show the accuracy of his insights.  Francis’s writing was marked not only by loyalty to the people from whom he came but by an unswerving devotion to telling the truth about the way the world really is, not...

According to family records, ten of Great-Grandma’s twelve sons died in the Civil War.   Thus it was that Allie Johnson Puett, the girl who became my Grandma Evetts, learned the lessons of self reliance, the duty of the defiance of illegitimate authority, the comforts of firearms, and the necessity of knowing how to shoot—wherein...

For the last several years Texas farmers and ranchers whose lands butt up against the Rio Grande have complained about cross-border raids by thugs of Mexican drug cartels.  “It’s a war.  Make no mistake about it,” said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples.  “And it’s happening on American soil.”  Staples thinks the bountiful productivity of the...

A theory about the mafia that was advanced in these pages by the late Samuel Francis about 15 years ago explains how Walmart, Costco, and Home Depot drive out your corner grocery, the local pharmacist, and Joe’s Hardware.  The national expansion of these blights isn’t free enterprise.  It’s more akin to the nationwide expansion of...

“Economy, n.  Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford.” —Ambrose Bierce   “That was the summer of seventy-three,” writes Forrest McDonald.  “Remember it well, and cherish the memory, for things will never be that good again.”  This is from his little book...

In 1861 U.S. President Abraham Lincoln  launched a war of conquest against the South, and legend claims it was all for the abolition of slavery, officially declared by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.  Yet exactly 101 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Lyndon B. Johnson, President of the forcefully reinstated Union, signed the Civil Rights Act...

When novelist Zora Neale Hurston died penniless in a Florida nursing home in 1960, she was buried in a charity cemetery in an unmarked grave, an ironic resting place for a talented American writer and folklorist who, by all accounts, was a dazzling and memorable personality.  Though her success had never been more than modest,...

Nine years ago, just before the invasion of Iraq by the United States and her allies, Dr. Michael Stenton wrote a prescient article in Chronicles looking forward to the likely Iraqi reaction and its consequences (“Our Yesterday and Your Today,” Views, February 2003). Stenton’s article described the British experience in Mesopotamia almost a century ago...

“War is hell,” and war is our permanent reality.  War has been the companion of man since the beginning of recorded history, together with the need to justify waging it.  Centuries before jus ad bellum was imperfectly codified in late-medieval Europe, the desire to make one’s cause seem righteous had become a regular companion of...

This issue of Chronicles commemorates what I suppose is an anniversary, of sorts.  It has been nine years since the February 2003 issue questioning the legitimacy of the war in Iraq was published, an anniversary which also roughly corresponds to the planning leading up to and including the prosecution of the war. Aside from the...

To survey the state of the American right—its friends, its enemies, its controversies—is to be nearly convinced we are living in Nietzsche’s nightmare world of “eternal recurrence.”  The current battle for the soul of the “Stupid Party” is an eerie reenactment of the battle that engulfed the GOP in 1963-64, with a different Romney as...

Can anything be done to stop Europe and the United States from becoming Third World countries?  Is the West doomed?  Considering that it doesn’t look as if things are going to get better any time soon, it is tempting for conservatives to write finis on Christendom and view the fall from a place of cynical...

According to many Christian theologians, Jesus, the moral Will of God, descended from a state of perfection to take on flesh and blood, with all the pain that goes with living and dying in time.  He did this to reveal Himself to the Jews.  A few saw Him as the embodiment of transcendent Perfection—God Himself. ...

Everyone hails democracy as the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but very few realize—or dare realize—that democracy actually represents one of the most perfect forms of tyranny, because it is one the average citizen is loath to acknowledge as such. It is indeed very simply a matter of taking...

Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid...

The vampire, possibly the most enduring mythic figure of the modern age, emerged out of the shadows of the Enlightenment.  To be sure, folkloric accounts of lamiae, strigae, and incubi predate the Christian era and continued to haunt the European imagination throughout the Middle Ages, when vampirism was generally associated with witchcraft.  But early in...

On this Friday evening, the Drum Circle has formed in Pritchard Park.  The drummers, many of them on the downhill side of 40, follow the lead of a tall black man standing before them.  The music is primitive and repetitious, like the drumming in one of the old Tarzan flicks.  In front of the drummers...

Last night we watched from the hotel terrace as a giant cargo ship cast anchor in the Tyrrhenian indigo and proceeded to unload fresh water for the whole of our sunburnt island, an enterprise which from that vantage point seemed a triumph of technology over nature.  A moment’s reflection, however, would have neatly reversed the...

Most college and university professors know that even though students may successfully complete remedial courses and even a full slate of freshman and sophomore classes, many will still be unable to use proper language mechanics or to work with complex math formulas at an advanced level.  It’s an observable fact that many graduate students, some...

“For who can be secure of private right, If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might?” —John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel Dryden’s question, posed more than 300 years ago, supposes a just distinction but also a connection between one kind of rights, which he calls “private,” and another, “sovereign sway,” or legitimate public order.  The...

More often than not, current events offer an opportunity for meditation.  This is the case today: The friends of a politician turned international financier, now to be tried for rape, have rallied round him, claiming his privacy has been invaded.  Though in this case the claim is downright preposterous, by appealing to the right to...

John C. Calhoun was the last great American statesman.  A statesman must be something of a prophet—one who has an historical perspective and says what he believes to be true and in the best long-range interest of the people, whether it is popular or not.  A politician, which is all we have now, says and...

When John Randolph of Roanoke looked at the America of 1806, into Thomas Jefferson’s second and disastrous term as President, he could have been describing today: “Everything and everybody seem to be jumbled out of place, except a few men steeped in supine indifference, whilst meddling fools and designing knaves are governing the country.” He...

I was in seventh grade, and we were downstate for the annual Bible Bowl.  Our little fundamentalist school fielded a team every year.  We were the most conservative of fundamentalists, which mean that we were King James Only (affectionately KJVO).  Along with soulwinning and no syncopation, KJVO was proof to the world that we were...