Category: Vital Signs

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” said G.K. Chesterton. All that talk about being the best is Olympic fever, ad hype. If everyone were the best, where would the rest of us be? In sports this is obvious. Perhaps not so much so in advanced nuclear physics. The guy next...

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...

For 200 years, American fighting men have gone into battle without women. George Washington conquered the British at Yorktown without women. Grant defeated Lee without women. Marines raised the flag on Iwo Jima without women. But those fellows must have been made of sterner stuff than men today. Now, apparently, the men can’t hack it,...

Christopher Lasch, who for many years served as chairman of the history department at the University of Rochester and who was famous for his commentaries on American social history, including such books as The Culture of Narcissism and Haven in a Heartless World, died in March 1994 at the age of 61. Those who knew...

Several months ago I attended a concert at New York’s Lincoln Center commemorating the 50th anniversary of WNYC, the not-for-profit radio station that is home to National Public Radio, and one of only two stations left in Manhattan that broadcast classical music. (The third, WNCN, recently switched over from yesterday’s court favorites to today’s rock...

All over official Washington, D.C., the big buzzword these days is “Diversity.” Cultural Diversity is not only the latest certified Wonderful Thing, it is Inevitable; and our arbiters of conscience have elevated it to the status of a sacrament. As a result, Washington office workers are constantly subjected to important events like American Indian Heritage...

After the initial horror of the Oklahoma City bombing, official reactions were certain to be heavy-handed, and a great many reasonable people were likely to be swept along with the draconian countermeasures proposed. We should not be surprised about the sweeping nature of the so-called “counterterrorist” laws suggested this spring, which included the inevitable package...

Our American government was founded on the ideal of res publia, the republic. History is filled with earnest attempts to create this ideal—Athens, Sparta, Rome—all of which served America’s founders as the intellectual backdrop for a true new world order. The original conception of a classical republic held public virtue in highest esteem. Rulers, magistrates,...

In England, it used to be possible to drift into a doctorate-level education simply by listening to the radio. A child could begin with adventure serials and comedies, graduate to radio theater versions of classic plays and novels or documentaries about historical figures, and end up listening to an Oxford don talking about the Oxford...

The author David Halberstam gave the principal address at the convocation opening Brown’s 1994-95 academic year. Time was when only the president of the university spoke, but recent presidents have instituted the policy of having a distinguished visitor give the main address. Halberstam is indeed a distinguished man with many significant books to his credit....

With every passing day the Eastern European countries are absorbed and integrated into Western-sponsored international institutions—the U.N., NATO, the European Union, the World Bank, etc. For Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, and Kiev, the West represents the light at the end of the tunnel, the gate to salvation. It is funny (tragic) to see: while the...

Probably the greatest triumph in public opinion manipulation in modern history was the West’s elevation of the Soviet Union into a symbol of righteousness and a country beyond criticism. This triumph was all the more notable because from day one of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin’s system, to quote Robert Conquest, “had as one of its...

The contract with America did not exist before September 1994. This was a time of surprising national fragmentation. Only two months were left before the midterm elections, and all over the country, Republican candidates had built campaigns around radical anti-Washington themes. States’ rights were back. State legislatures passed Tenth Amendment resolutions. Militias were organized. We...

Danger lurks everywhere these days, even in five gallon plastic tubs of feta cheese. The containers of feta delivered to our restaurant come embellished with sketches of a baby falling headfirst into a bucket of cheese, which is preserved in liquid, and therefore comes complete with grim warnings of possible drownings in English and Español....

For at least a year now—ever since the evidence became intellectually irrefutable while yet being emotionally deniable—every second sentence written or spoken about Bill Clinton by the dominant media has begun with the word “if.” Reduced to its essence, the two-sentence refrain goes like this: Americans do not believe Bill Clinton. If Bill Clinton can...

To the old popular proverb, “The only good communist is a dead communist,” we should perhaps now add: “Once a communist, forever a communist.” Although as a muscled ideology communism is dead, as a way of life it is still very much alive. Similar to any other past and present mass belief or theology, communism...

Nowhere is the right of free expression more hotly debated than on our nation’s campuses. The recent controversy at my school, the University of Michigan, is a prime example. On January 9, U-M sophomore “Jake Baker”— a/k/a Abraham Jacob Alkhabaz, a 21-year-old Kuwaiti-American who uses his mother’s maiden name—did what he often did: he signed...

Effective January 1, 1994, the right Reverend Clarence Pope, Episcopal Bishop of Fort Worth, not only retired but left the Episcopal Church for Rome. He is the highest-ranking Episcopalian to leave the denomination. Bishop Pope was one of a handful of bishops willing to stand against a liberal hierarchy. As is true of many Episcopalians,...

Elizabethtown College, the liberal arts school which I attend, now has both a radical feminist group called Womenspeak and a homosexual advocacy group called Allies, the latter, of course, filled with sympathetic heterosexuals, primarily women. One would think that a small private school of 1,400 students in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, could insulate itself from the...

“The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. . . . Our religion . . . has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing. Poetry attaches its...

Most of us recognize that cries for “tolerance” have become the left’s weapon of choice in its erosion of those few civilized norms that remain in American life. The image the left likes to conjure up is that of an ignorant band of rednecks sadistically persecuting homosexuals or other minorities, when the truth is that...

At the heart of the most recent political correctness controversy at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where I am a graduate student, is the proposed “Great Books Certificate Program.” The program, first presented to the Course and Curriculum Committee last November, is the brainchild of a group of 23 professors headed by Dr. David...

Roy Gutman’s Witness to Genocide raises the specter of Janet Cooke. Although the author of Witness to Genocide, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning “dispatches” on the “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia, speaks American English, from the many awkward phrases in “his” book one might infer that someone other than Mr. Gutman wrote at least parts of it....

Licensing Parents, a new book by University of Wisconsin psychiatrist Jack C. Westman, bewails a recent surge in “incompetent parenting,” a phenomenon which he defines as depriving a child not only of sufficient food, clothing, and shelter, but also of “affectionate holding, touching and talking,” all the while displaying an “insensitivity to a child’s initiatives...

“There’s a world of misery in every X mouthful of meat,” fumes the headline in an advertisement back in the September/October 1993 issue of E, “The Environmental Magazine.” The ad continues: “The grain which fattens animals for our dinner tables is oft time ‘appropriated’ from the peoples of Third World countries; it enriches dictators while...

Since its publication late last year, The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein has encountered a barrage of criticism for emphasizing the societal implications of IQ differences. Some critics argue that the work rests upon “bogus” and “outdated” theories of intelligence. Others charge that the book promotes dubious scientific claims. One...

Little Women Produced by Denise DiNovi Directed by Gillian Armstrong Based on the book by Louisa May Alcott Screenplay by Robin Swicord Released by Columbia Pictures As the recent effort to remake Little Women suggests, Hollywood has remembered that an almost certain way to make a profitable film is to turn a bestselling children’s classic...

“Side by Side by Sontag” was the London Observer‘s headline describing an evidently turbulent scene at the last Edinburgh Festival. The comedian Simon Fanshawe spotted a famous couple hobnobbing hard together— photographer Annie Leibovitz and her bosom buddy: “the great critic and writer Susan Sontag.” As the Observer’s “Arts Diary” put it: “Unable to contain...

For 30 years, elementary and secondary education has been taking on a new orientation, away from substantive subject matter toward a mental health agenda. Personality development—i.e., the “whole child” concept of education—has become the primary focus of schooling. Collection of psychological data on minors, and its storage in nonsecure, cross-referenecable facilities, without the prior notification...

Years ago, in an article he wrote for the New Yorker titled “My Philosophy,” in a section subheadlined “Eschatological Dialects as a Means of Coping with Singles,” Woody Allen wrote: “We can say that the universe consists of a substance, and this substance we will call ‘atoms,’ or else we will call it ‘monads.’ Democritus...

The recent controversy involving Olympic diving star Greg Louganis highlights more than the moral degeneracy of the latest poster boy for AIDS. When Louganis hit his head on the diving board and bled into the pool at the 1988 Olympics, the only honorable and morally just thing for him to do was to notify all...

Leonard Bernstein was a fine midcentury American composer and conductor. He also achieved notoriety as one of the postwar period’s first and most visible celebrants of extreme leftwing attitudes. Bernstein’s garden parties for the Black Panthers in their baddest days evoked the phrase radical chic, which entered our language as an early marker of what...

Three years ago, the American Bar Association voted to abandon its neutral position on legalized abortion and to endorse Roe v. Wade. In response to this action, some 14,000 members of the ABA resigned in protest. Many attorneys felt it was impossible for them to remain a member of, let alone contribute money to, an...

Russia’s ill-fated decision to intervene in the Chechen civil war has precipitated a political crisis at least as heated, and far more bloody, than the 1993 presidential-parliamentary showdown. Consider the following; all the major “democratic” parties, including former prime minister and Yeltsin backer Yegor Gaidar’s “Russia’s Choice,” have denounced the intervention and called for a...

When the new guru of the Grand Old Party waddled up to the Speaker’s chair and took his oath, the clock began ticking. The GOP had 100 days to fulfill a good measure of its “Contract with America.” Since House Speaker Gingrich has been planning his takeover of Congress for more than two decades, just...

It has always been my impression that people who talk and write most about the creative process are not usually very creative. It’s sort of like a corollary to that old maxim, “Those who can’t do, teach”; those who can’t create, analyze creativity. Conversely, I must confess that as a book critic who also publishes...

Last June, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, loosed a posse of some 700 well-armed and irate citizens to win back control of the streets and parking lots of Phoenix from the local goons. The sheriff’s pronouncement, “We’re going to get the bad guys,” alarmed the local ACLU, which likened the militia to “a...

Until the rise of Rush Limbaugh, talk-show hosts and callers were pretty much ignored by the people who regard themselves as the guardians of Correct Thought. They seemed to regard talk shows as forums for the intellectually deprived, unworthy of attention from the ivory tower set. As we all know, this situation has changed markedly...

After I authored a Washington Post article critical of Rush Limbaugh from a conservative perspective, William Kristol of the Project on the Republican Future took me to task, telling a reporter that I had judged the popular talk show host by “extreme standards.” Limbaugh, he said, is “plenty conservative for me.” Among other things, my...

In his book The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver explains different types of argumentation. The most effective type is the argument from definition, which forces one’s attention on values and demands either assent or rejection of those values. In Lincoln’s arguments on slavery, to follow Weaver’s example, the Negro was either a man or not...

In reading the Charles Manson story, Helter Skelter, I was struck by a brief passage about Manson’s admiration for Hitler. Manson believed he had things in common with Hitler, and there were similarities in their lives, however trivial: both were vegetarians; both had an incredible ability to influence others; and both were frustrated, rejected artists....

The spring 1994 issue of Telos, dealing primarily with the European New Right, signaled the drift of this formerly Marxist journal toward the populist right. This change in direction has been increasingly obvious for at least a decade and could be seen in the turning of Telos editor Paul Piccone from his New Left activism...

Cleanth Brooks, one of the giants of literary criticism, died last May 10. He was 87 years old. He taught thousands of us how to read a poem or a story. Some he taught over a half-century by way of the classroom, some in his numerous public lectures across this country and abroad, and many...

European nations are seeing their cultural if not their actual borders weakened by multiculturalism and the process known as “McDonaldization.” But Austrians, in contrast to their neighbors in Germany where status quo politics are the order of the day, are avidly protesting the corruption, incompetence, and slack enforcement of immigration restrictions characteristic of the “Grand...

Only a few years ago prospects for the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation, the country’s oldest “conservative” public interest law firm, hardly seemed promising. In 1986, PLF president and CEO Ronald Zumbrun decided to indulge in deficit spending to continue unpopular land use and takings litigation. The legacy of judicial activism from the 1960’s and 70’s...

The game of baseball is centered on home: pitchers throw the ball over home plate, batters hit home runs, and fans root for the home team. Apparently, baseball’s preoccupation with home is no accident. According to a recent study by Denver psychologist Howard Markham, the average divorce rate in cities that have major league baseball...

When the former communist bloc disintegrated, the opening of secret police files in several European countries demonstrated the incredibly thorough hold that the clandestine state had possessed over ordinary citizens. In East Germany, for example, State Security (Stasi) files revealed the existence of vast networks of control and surveillance in any area of life that...

Day 1. A celebrity chokes to death on a peanut butter sandwich. Day 2. Headlines: “Celebrity’s Fatal Snack.” “Shocked Fans Mourn Hero.” The American Alliance of Alarmist Research Groups (AAARG) reports that 10,000 Americans died in 1992 from choking on peanut butter, and demands warning labels, tougher laws, and increased federal spending. Victims Advising People...