Category: Vital Signs

Since the origins of the Swiss Confederation in 1291, it has been the duty of every male Swiss citizen to be armed and to serve in the militia. Today, that arm is an “assault rifle,” which is issued to every Swiss male and which must be kept in the home. During Germany’s Third Reich (1933-1945),...

My grandfather spent most of his days underground, as a cutter in his cousin’s coal mine in Imperial, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. At night, he would arrive home looking like he had been through an explosion. Outside the kitchen door, my grandmother kept a large metal tub full of water to soak the coal dust off...

Did Asian operatives, some of them connected with the People’s Republic of China, influence the White House, the Department of Commerce, and other offices of the executive branch? This is one of the questions of the day concerning the Clinton administration. The Senate Committee on Government Affairs has said that it “believes that high-level Chinese...

Guns in the right hands make all good people safer—including people who don’t own guns. The higher the number of responsible people who have guns ready to be used for selfdefense, the safer the public is. The tremendous degree to which widespread gun ownership makes American homes safer from home invaders is one of the...

The fate of one family rarely matters except to those directly involved. Yet family histories—often tragedies can sometimes tell us a great deal about a nation’s social fabric. One such story involves my aunt, Vida Knezevich Kontich—my mother’s older sister—and her family. Their fate was never far from mind during my diplomatic assignment with the...

Hank Williams died on New Year’s Day, 1953. He was not yet 30 when he passed away in the back of a Cadillac. The circumstances of his life and death created the legendary aura that surrounds Williams and virtually guaranteed that he would be the subject of many songs as well as a writer and...

The appearance of an article about American church life on the front page of the Washington Post is a rare occurrence. But the approval by the Presbyterian Church (United States) of a church law requiring celibacy of its non-married clergy gained front-page attention in the Post not just once but twice this year. Treatment of...

Hillary Clinton would love Amherst, Massachusetts, a town aptly nicknamed “The People’s Republic of Amherst.” A stroll down Main Street quickly reveals that Birkenstocks and Volvos dominate the landscape. Amherst’s legislative body, the Town Meeting, often votes on the kind of citizen petitions that call on the community (population 35,000) to join the AFLCIO’s “union...

Mom and Dad went to the beach and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” This saying captures a bad joke that is played on kids. But when you’re chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and end up with a lousy T-shirt, it shouldn’t be a laughing matter. In the ease of Jesse Helms...

Thomas Molnar has published books in English, French, and Hungarian, while seeing some of his writings, mostly those dealing with the “mal moderne,” translated into German, Spanish, and Italian. Though defined in his work in various ways, from rampant Catholic heresy to political utopianism, this evil for Molnar is best described by his phrase l’hégémonie...

Last year, in a span of less than six months, President Clinton vetoed the congressional ban on partial-birth abortion, thereby positioning himself, based on public-opinion surveys of the procedure, as an abortion extremist; and spoke publicly, more than once, about his desire, now or in the future, to adopt a child. (His current position on...

A recent report by the federally appointed National Church Arson Task Force has confirmed that there never was any evidence of an upsurge in racist, fiery attacks upon black churches, despite the media spotlight of last year. The report told us little that is actually new. Insurance statistics showing that 500-600 churches suffer arson every...

Decisions, decisions. Such is the life of a black man in America today. Whether to be a black nationalist, a black Muslim, an Afrocentrist, or simply a color-blind Christian—a.k.a. an “Oreo,” a traitor to the black race. Such choices are not new; they were made by black Americans in earlier generations, dramatically in the ease...

“Polonophobia,” my essay in the January issue of Chronicles, engendered moving and informed responses for which I am most grateful. Professors Ewa Thompson and Alex Kurczaba and Dr. Wojciech Wierzewski have all praised me generously in letters to the editor [Eds. note: See the Polemics and Exchanges section of the April issue], but, according to...

At the first Congress on Racial Justice and Reconciliation, held in Washington in May, the Reverend Earl W. Jackson, the black director of the mostly white “Samaritan Project” of the Christian Coalition, told 500 mostly black Christians that, despite many blacks’ warnings that he was selling out to the “religious right,” “our agenda” is “the...

June 16 is Bloomsday, named after the character of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce’s huge book takes place all on that long June day in 1904—250,000 words long, that is. We are told that Ulysses is one of the most important books of the century. We are told it is an intelligent book....

“Tarry not, I pray you, Madam,” Walter Raleigh is supposed to have cautioned Queen Elizabeth, “for the wings of time are tipped with the feathers of death.” As Harold Macmillan observed a few years ago: “Civil servants don’t write memos like that anymore.” Some have trouble just speaking the language. Nicholas Burns, the State Department...

The federal government officially recognizes “Hispanic”—an artificial and arbitrary concept devoid of ethnic, racial, cultural, or linguistic meanings—as a legitimate collective identity for two reasons. Domestically, it is to create a “Hispanic nation” within the United States, to inflate the numerical size of that “nation,” and to have all members of that “nation” eligible for...

Reading Joseph Blotner’s biography revives my memories of Robert Penn Warren. I was summoned to his rooms at Silliman College on September 5, 1969. I was a freckled, red-haired 18-year-old in whom he may have seen an apparition from his past. “Show me the poems you wrote this summer,” he demanded. I produced a sheaf...

Girls mature physically and socially earlier than boys, God’s way of bettering the survival odds for female children. This accelerated maturation coupled with the intrinsically feminine culture of public education, where the ideal student is a little woman, accounts for the scholastic dominance of girls in the early grades. But as puberty strikes the old...

“Courage,” said the Philosopher, “is the prime philosophical virtue” (by which he meant the moral kind) “lacking which all the others become irrelevancies one has no nerve to bring oneself to put into practice.” It is a notion from another time, in accord with which it came to pass that the philosophical cream of my...

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. There is irony in the fact that although prayer has been banned in our public schools, millions of American schoolkids are required to recite...

This speech was delivered in April at the Webb School, a private secondary school in Knoxville, Tennessee. I try not to put on airs about what I do for a living. I would never tell you that writing is dignified enough to be called a profession, like being a doctor or an architect. Writing is...

I happen to be a conservative, a Christian, and white. I am also in the military, and I disapprove of homosexuality. At the University of Wisconsin, there is little tolerance for this combination of characteristics. As a student there, I served as the symbol of all that’s wrong with the world. My checkbook showed just...

The news that Jeff Shaara, author of Gods and Generals, will turn his novel of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville into a made-for-TV movie should give pause hereabouts. A lot of folks who live within a rebel yell of Malvern Hill recall what Hollywood, with Ted Turner commanding troop movements, did to The Killer Angels and...

The annual process of extending “most-favored-nation” (MFN) trade status to communist China was to have a new twist this year. Beijing’s friends in Washington were pushing for an end to this embarrassing review of Beijing’s brutal behavior by granting MFN to China on a permanent basis. The move was to be attempted before China takes...

Monday was a good day, typical of good days in its variety. I was on the phone with another lawyer trying to settle a whiplash. His unlicensed truck driver ran into the rear of my man’s ear with a 50,000-pound cement truck. This case will settle. Another client called. She was ostensibly concerned about her...

“It is a sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything,” confessed George Soros to a British newspaper, “but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” Recalling youthful fantasies of omnipotence in his 1987 book The Alchemy of Finance, the multibillionaire...

On May 15, 1972, I was a nine-year-old Little Leaguer determined to become the next Johnny Bench. As I headed home from the playground after baseball practice, our neighbor, Willie Kines, waved me over to his car. I remember thinking it odd that he would be picking me up, given that I lived only three...

Louis Farrakhan has become the most important black leader in America, if not the world. He has also become a quasi-mainstream figure, and brought to record levels black participation in political life. While Americans in general are less and less interested in politics—as seen in the 1996 elections—the opposite trend is at work within the...

Eastern Europeans are plagued by provincialism: they believe that everything coming from the West must intrinsically be good. Yesterday, the intellectual fashion, spreading from Berkeley to the University of Vincennes in France, consisted of regurgitating the dogma of Yugoslav “self-management” and learning the catechism of “socialism with a human face.” Today, times have changed in...

The literature of recanting radicals has been with us since 1917: from the recollections of Russian Mensheviks, who rued the day they joined with Lenin, to Irving Kristol’s “Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” in which the neoconservative godfather fondly reminisces about his youthful dalliance with dissident communism. With each successive atrocity and betrayal—Kronstadt, the Moscow Trials,...

Oh, the tedium. We are confronted, yet again, with the spectacle of the establishment media suffering one of their spasms of professional angst, as they ask each other, with fake drama, what their audience, in genuine anger, frequently asks them: Why do you get so much so wrong so often? For those who have witnessed...

“Well,” said Sam Donaldson on This Week With David Brinkley” last February 23, “how many foreign languages do you speak?” “Five,” replied the new U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. “Well, four; depends on whether you count English as a foreign language. I guess it is to me.” We all know that Madeleine Albright is...

Frederick Wilhelmsen (1923-1996) is still revered in Catholic circles of the Hispanic world, where he is praised as a friend and a scholar and a kind of honorary Spaniard, and to crown it all, an incarnation of Don Quixote. The latter title has been awarded to him in a noble sense: fighting impossible battles, following...

Historians of the future who look back at us, assuming the survival of critical intelligence in the future, will characterize our times as the Age of Bureaucracy. A time in which nearly every human endeavor—religion, education, economy, national defense—was swallowed up in huge institutions which existed for their own sakes rather than for the purposes...

The nine states that ratified the Constitution on June 21, 1788, created an entirely new government. This government was not patterned after the one established under the Articles of Confederation, which was created by the 13 states just seven years before. The Articles actually transferred very little power to the agent they called the “central,”...

Karen Finley is a “performance artist.” Her performances are succinctly described by Judge Robert Bork in his new book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: “Before an audience, [Finley] would strip to the waist, smear her body with chocolate (to represent excrement) and sprouts (sperm), and wail about what men have done to women.” According to a recent...

There ain’t no shame in a job well done, from driving a nail to driving a truck. As a matter of fact, I’d like to set things straight, A few more people should be pulling their weight. If you want a cram course in reality, You get yourself a working man’s Ph.D. —Aaron Tippin, “Working...

On May 20, 1996, the United States Supreme Court engaged in its own version of tort reform by striking down the punitive damages award of two million dollars in the BMW of North America v. Gore case. Unfortunately, this case represents an example of two of the worst trends in public policy: expansion of the...

A first-grade teacher in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., concludes that while some of her pupils suffer various degrees of parental neglect, others seem to be experiencing the opposite extreme: such pampering at home that they cannot even tie their own shoes, and must have it done for them. It takes a while before she...

Remember Gwen Dreyer? No, of course not. She was the poor, unfortunate midshipman who was “chained to a urinal” at the United States Naval Academy in the winter of 1990. The incident came at the end of a long day of snowball fights and practical jokes, in which Ms. Dreyer had willingly taken part. Sometime...

August Derleth was one of the principal forces that established science fiction as a legitimate literary genre. He was a product of the “pulp” era, who founded a unique publishing company in 1939 called Arkham House. He had no long-range agenda for his progeny other than to rescue the writings of his late friend and...

The FBI’s “Hate Crime Statistics”—preliminary figures for 1995 were released in November—are highly suspect because of the agency’s flawed methodology. The problem is that, in recording and identifying the perpetrators of hate crimes, there are no strictly defined categories for thugs of “European-American,” “Hispanic,” or “Middle Eastern” descent. The term “Hispanic” has already been officially...

I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat. The snakeskin titles of mining claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat. —Stephen Vincent Benet, American Names My family used to live in a mountain valley near a mining community in the wilds...

President Clinton has vowed to correct portions of welfare reform that are “carried out on the backs of immigrants.” About half of the projected savings from the reform comes from limiting immigrant access to welfare. Refugees, who make up about one in seven legal immigrants, were spared most of the restrictions placed on other immigrants...

“He was just kidding,” our waitress said about her coworker, the sometimes banquet waiter Marcus Burrizon, age 21, who was just hauled away in shackles and leg irons by Secret Service agents. It was “Renaissance Weekend” in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and President Clinton and about 1,600 top achievers were getting together for beach fun-runs...

The President and Congress have both promised us a balanced budget in the year 2002. The debt, at that time, will be somewhere between six and seven trillion dollars, which, assuming a seven percent interest rate, will cost close to $450 billion a year in interest. Each year, every year, forever. Is it plausible to...

“It’s everywhere,” says Mike, a young cop in Pittsburgh’s Zone Four, an urban area that runs from Brookline to Broadhead Manor, referring to the widespread use of illegal drugs, especially among kids. “My girlfriend even uses it. Almost every kid I stop, when I check their cigarettes, there’s marijuana in the pack,” he explains. “We...

        “It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. There is Mortimer’s, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg Branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane’s carriage-building depot. That carries us right on to the other block.” —Arthur Conan Doyle, The...