Category: Vital Signs

“I’m angry. I’d like to ask President Clinton why is my dad dead? And what are we doing fighting in Bosnia in the first place?” Coming from the 15-year-old son of Sergeant First Class Donald A. Dugan, the first operational fatality of the United States intervention in Bosnia, those questions command respect. But they are...

To place equal blame on the Serbs and Croats for the tragedy in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina appears to be an exercise in academic self-righteousness. On the international hit parade of bad guys, some Bosnian Serbs take the lead, followed, in the distance, by some Bosnian Croats—while the Bosnian Muslims are more or less exonerated from...

As 1995 drew to a close, Senate Democrats and Republicans were still debating Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms’ legislation to restructure the State Department and its ancillary agencies. Helms wanted to jettison the United States Agency for International Development, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the United States Information Agency, fold their functions...

Less than two months after Washington Times editor-in-chief Wes Pruden in June demoted me to the rank of editorial writer and cut my salary by 25 percent, yet another cloud began to form on my horizon. In May 1994, I had given a speech at a conference on “Race and American Culture” in Atlanta sponsored...

A newsman, being thrashed about in the middle of a media mob, shouted, “Don’t push me!” Another newsman responded, “You gonna get pushed.” A shoving match ensued that would have made any schoolyard dispute look highbrow. An exchange of expletives followed. The press coverage of the 1996 New Hampshire primary was in full swing. This...

The pilgrimage to Mecca sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) was everything it was meant to be. The faithful were comprised of hot- and cold-running state legislators from all over the union. They came in all shapes, sizes, genders, brands, and parties; they all had agendas, lists, forms, and maps of Milwaukee,...

The conventional wisdom regarding the Internet appears to have changed practically overnight. Once championed as a wonderful Information-Age tool to “empower the individual,” the net is now more likely to be denounced as an iniquitous network of right-wing conspiracy theorists and former Luftwaffe pilots. I would be the last person to peddle a gospel of...

The winter Balkan lull has let Congress off the hook for rolling over and playing dead in response to President Clinton’s dispatch of troops to Bosnia. It is cruel irony that the fewer casualties American troops sustain, the more likely we are to continue permitting further such devaluations of democracy. That will accentuate the eternal...

The need for God is a characteristic of our time. The difficulties and the uncertainties of daily life; the dangers that impinge both on individuals and the entire human species; the struggles and conflicts that lurk everywhere; the outbursts of violence; the moral and civil disorder—all make human beings feel the need for an assistance...

What do Billy Graham and Stanley Fish have in common? According to most assessments of the ongoing culture wars, the answer is an emphatic “not much!” With the exception of a few inconsequential details—both are older white men living in North Carolina —little seems to unite these two figures or the movements for which they...

I teach seventh- and eighth-graders at the St. George Orthodox Church School in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a purely volunteer task that takes 45 minutes out of my Sunday and two hours out of the rest of the week. The school, which extends from kindergarten to grade 12, is attached to St. George’s Church, the Antiochian...

On a recent Sunday, my church bulletin ran this edifying announcement: “Is cutting health, income assistance, nutrition and safety guarantees of millions of children and shredding the national safety net for children the kind of reform we support? Call President Clinton to let him know what you are for. ‘I was hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick...

“The predisposition to religious belief,” wrote sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, “is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature.” Christians would agree with Mr. Wilson, but it is his fellow atheists, not Christians, who have dominated the religious (though not the truly spiritual)...

“You are doing God’s work,” Brady Bill sponsor Charles Schumer remarked to Sarah Brady at a congressional hearing. And perhaps one could argue that if it took God seven days to make the world, people should not be able to buy a handgun in any less time. But did God really support the Brady Bill?...

After nearly a decade of working for the Washington Times, I was fired last September. Technically, I “resigned,” but Wes Pruden, the Times‘ editor-in-chief, asked me for a letter of resignation, and I had no real choice but to agree. Nor, by that time, had I any real desire to remain on the staff. The...

Mary Beth Edelson’s 1977 poster “Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper” not only means to spread the word that there are, in fact, dozens of American women artists who have not yet become household names, but also to appropriate the sacred images of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” by giving that point an in-your-face punch....

Goldeneye Produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein Released by United Artists In the best of the James Bond films derived directly from the novels of Ian Fleming—Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball—Sean Connery was able to evoke the gentlemanly,...

Although crime has become a major social problem, we could vanquish it without curtailing the liberties of law-abiding citizens, without mistreating suspects or convicts, and without added cost. The only major obstacle is the inertia of legislators. Over half of the convicts now in prison are younger than 29 years old. Only six percent are...

Not much can be understood about the new role of the political left and right in Eastern Europe without taking into account two fundamental factors, generally ignored by both critical and enthusiastic observers of the post-1990 years. One is the historic trauma of the five-century-old division of Europe into two halves, effected by the Turkish...

Yuri Petrov (not his real name) immigrated to America from the Soviet Union ten years ago. Now Yuri wants his mother to move to America, but there is one problem. His mother doesn’t want to leave her life and the rest of her family behind in Russia. Tired of sending money every month to Moscow...

So you thought writing hard-core pornography was an easy way to earn a living? You remembered your adolescence and those turgid paperbacks in which the vocabulary was strictly four-letter, the plot rambling and forgotten halfway through the book, and the characters’ names changed periodically as though some of the chapters were lifted bodily from other...

“Boys had been beaten since history began and it would be a bad day for the world if ever, inconceivably, boys should cease to be beaten.” So said C.S. Forester in Lieutenant Hornblower. Clarence Davis, a black Democratic member of the Maryland House of Delegates, courageously proposed restoring judicial flogging in Maryland last year. Courts...

On May 25, 1993, the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 827, which established the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991. Of course, by ignoring the atrocities that occurred in the Balkans during 1941-1945 and by...

“It’s time for the government to pay us reparations for the 500 years of slavery that they put on us,” declared a marcher in the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., on October 16. I attended the march on assignment for Rush Limbaugh, The Television Show. My coverage of the march aired on Mr. Limbaugh’s...

For the past decade or so, my research has focused on assessing racial differences in brain size and intelligence, sexual habits and fertility, personality and temperament, and speed of maturation and longevity. Startling and alarming to main people is my conclusion that if all people were treated the same, most racial differences would not disappear....

School math textbooks 50 years ago were not written by mathematicians. The typical author was the chairman of a school science department somewhere, in a district large enough to make writing a textbook remunerative even if nobody else in the country used it. That he was ignorant of mathematics was unnoticed by an ignorant public...

In a landmark five-to-four decision last spring, in United States v. Lopez, the Supreme Court announced—for the first time in almost 50 years—that Congress had exceeded its interstate commerce powers. At issue was a federal statute—the Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990—which forbade the carrying of firearms within one thousand feet of a school....

In Suzanne M. Bartley et al v. United States, a class-action suit filed on April 17, 1995, in federal district court in Milwaukee, my wife, on behalf of herself and all others who paid federal taxes for the years 1991-93, has sued for a refund of approximately 70 percent of the revenue collected during those...

Never say Republicans can’t learn. After losing the presidency in 1992 on the tax issue, they now use euphemisms for their tax hikes and hide the increases with new and improved fiscal gimmickry. In this Congress, the word “reform” has come to be synonymous with a scheme to extract more money from the private sector,...

What are you doing this year for Kwanzaa? T’his was once a ludicrous question, but in today’s urban America public agencies, newspapers, and businesses trip over themselves showing their unqualified support for this anomalous occasion. Presented now as a religious, if not a national event, Kwanzaa immediately follows the “Judeo-Christian” holidays. It is one thing...

Children’s books used to relate tales of heroes and villains. They presented a Manichaean world in which good triumphed over evil. Children might be scared, but they were assured that the forces of light could easily be distinguished from the forces of evil. Well, that scenario of yesteryear has been replaced by a very different...

In 1986, Justice William Brennan delivered an address in which he called for “state courts to step into the breach” left by what he discerned as a federal contraction of rights and remedies. In other words, those who wish to remake American society along radically egalitarian lines could no longer count on a sympathetic federal...

Edward Gibbon wrote, “As long as the same passions and interests subsist among mankind, the questions of war and peace, of justice and policy, which were debated in the councils of antiquity, will frequently present themselves as the subject of modern deliberation.” To a career soldier there is something incongruous in the business of “peacekeeping.”...

A medieval European ventured outside his walled city warily, knowing that robbers lurked in the wilds beyond the reach of the feudal order. In late 20th-century America, we have turned this around—for most of us, it is only when we venture into the city that we concern ourselves with the lawless. They thrive there, provided...

One aspect of America that most impressed Alexis de Tocqueville was how individuals could often accomplish what the most “energetic centralized administration” could not. This ability was well demonstrated, according to Tocqueville, in how efficiently America dealt with crime and criminals: A state police does not exist, and passports are unknown. The criminal police of...

Homeschooling is one of the many fronts in the state’s war against the citizen. Despite the efforts of organizations such as the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Rutherford Institute, and Eagle Forum, as well as longstanding laws that protect family autonomy, homeschooling parents are still viewed as neglectful if not downright abusive. With methods...

To mainstream environmental activists, Ron Arnold merits special disdain. A former Sierra Club conservation committee member, Arnold now runs, with associate Alan Gottlieb, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise in Bellevue, Washington. Together they wrote a 1993 expose of the environmental movement, Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America, which remains...

Earlier this year, when Connie Chung duped Newt Gingrich’s mother into confiding that Newt considered the First Lady a “bitch,” victim feminists went into a frenzy. Gingrich’s mother and father hardly expected this treatment from Chung, as they had spent eight hours treating her like a guest in their modest home (Gingrich’s father had even...

It would be easy to view the recent spate of movies and documentaries that side with Amerindians against the white man as no more than a long-delayed surge of racial revenge, and of course that emotion is openly expressed in all of them. I refer to the cycle, begun by Dances with Wolves, that includes...

Braveheart Produced by Mel Gibson Directed by Mel Gibson Screenplay by Randall Wallace Released by Paramount Pictures In recent films, “angry white males” are generally portrayed as psychopaths, and it is, therefore, almost astonishing that even a good conservative like Mel Gibson should have chosen to make a movie on the life of William Wallace....

Celebrating St. Andrew’s Day (November 30) is not uncommon among Scots, especially in the English-speaking world, but the widespread commemoration of the birthday of the poet Robert Burns (January 25), even by non-Scots or “Scots for a day,” sets this national group apart from all others. No other national heritage rests so heavily on the...

The United States today has numerous allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East whom Americans are committed to defend. Despite the end of the Cold War, Americans are regaled at home and abroad with rationales for reinvigorating alliances that skeptics question in the new era. In essence, we are admonished by advocates of the...

Currently wars are being fought in the Balkans, in Russia, in Southeast Asia, and in various parts of Africa, but they involve relatively few people. Despite these wars, we live in reasonably peaceful times, and no threat of a major war appears on the horizon. Yet, although we don’t know when war will break out...

The operational philosophy and military role of the United Nations have radically changed. In the U.N.’s first five years it launched only two peacekeeping missions, but since the fall of the Soviet Union the U.N. has mounted 19 operations involving more than 70,000 blue-helmeted soldiers. Last year these operations cost $3.6 billion. The United States...

On the French nightly news for Monday, June 12, the anchor’s face was so grim that, at first, I thought the French forces in Bosnia had suffered serious losses. But, no, he was reporting on the French municipal elections, the first round of voting for mayors of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. The...

Imagine a political party that favors the withdrawal of troops from Bosnia and formal debate over whether to remain in NATO, yet in the next breath opposes government-imposed privileges for homosexuals and other politically correct groups, among them Sikhs demanding to wear turbans to work. This party not only supports cutting corporate welfare and abolishing...

Any young philosopher who aspires to an academic career must, especially in these days of fiscal restraint and feminized privilege, include in his plans a trip to the annual American Philosophical Association (APA) Convention, a curious hybrid of frenetic job-hunting and highbrow hobnobbing widely reviled as “the meat market.” Although Pacific and Central Divisions of...

In my essay “Triberalism“ in last October’s issue of Chronicles, which detailed the hijacking of the Chicago Tribune in recent years by in-your-face homosexuals and other assorted leftwing counterculture misfits, I noted that there was still at least one Tribune writer who had the courage to thumb his nose at his paper’s new policy equating...