Category: Vital Signs

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the 92-year-old Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, died without an heir, or that he sorely disappointed a considerable faction of his most zealous disciples by refusing to cheat death and thus show himself as the Messiah, what followed the traditional seven days of mourning turned out to be...

Beth and John want to break the news in as civilized a manner as possible. After all, they mean to have a pleasant weekend away in their cabin. So, over beers, cheerfully, they tell John’s parents that Beth is leaving him for his best friend—who is smiling in the armchair in the corner, the fifth...

Harassed any hirelings lately? Don’t think so? Let’s see. Do you refer to the office Christmas party as a “Christmas party”? Sing carols and say grace? Invite your employees to join you for church? Wear “precious feet” on your lapels and plead with subordinates not to abort? Lead morning prayers over the P.A. system? The...

In a 1956 essay, Edmund Wilson wrote: “Cabell is out of fashion.” Withdrawing his dismissal of James Branch Cabell, Wilson gave him a critical accolade—and his generosity was praiseworthy. For by 1956, Cabell was not only out of fashion but virtually forgotten, though he was not alone in this. Most of his contemporaries, more or...

“Democratic capitalism” equals political correctness for the neoconservative. It is a term at least as ubiquitous on these shores and on others as McDonald’s, Coke, and Disneyland. It is the “Sesame!” that opens doors as well as markets and whose usage, planet-wide, is becoming as offensive and boring as “international proletariat” and “socialist realism” used...

Natural Born Killers Produced by Jane Hamsher, Don Murphy, and Clayton Townsend Directed by Oliver Stone Story by Quentin Tarantino Screenplay by David Veloz, Richard Rutowski, and Oliver Stone Released by Warner Brothers The release of Oliver Stone’s new film Natural Born Killers was heralded by the sort of publicity barrage that arouses the skepticism...

Nobody can deny that the videosphere has completely devoured the graphosphere. The one-dimensional surreal world has hijacked the three-dimensional real world. The CNN and ABC networks in America, the French TF1 and TF2, have totally displaced books and journals. The swift, levitating image has come ahead of the solidly grounded written word. No longer is...

The sensitive conservative. An oxymoron to most liberals. An eye-averting embarrassment to many conservatives. And, it would seem in 1994, an irrelevancy. Who needs sensitive conservatives when Democrats in power can assure tolerance and sensitivity? All in all, it’s a dubious time to be a touchy-feely man of the right. Just my luck. Actually, I...

The modern weapon of “sanctions” seems made-to-order for the foreign policy of Bill Clinton. Remarkably evasive and unprincipled even for a modern politician, Clinton is possessed of a horror of commitment in both his personal and his political life. The armamentarium of minute differentia in sanctions allows Clinton to posture at length as a man...

Peter Mayle has dominated the nonfiction best-seller lists in recent years with his chronicles of life in the south of France. A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence (both published in the United States in 1991) even spawned a fourpart television series, which was produced by the BBC and has run regularly on the Arts...

Not long after the conviction of Alger Hiss, Professor James Burnham, Karl Hess, and I met in my apartment on Riverside Drive to discuss a matter that had concerned us for some time. Jim Burnham was then working on his book The Web of Subversion. Karl, like me, was a Newsweek editor, and he had...

In March 1969, at 32 years of age, I was by far the youngest of the ten chairmen of Foreign Area Studies at American University—and certainly the one with the least impressive credentials. Among my colleagues were not only well-known scholars, but former advisors to Presidents, reputable writers, a man who had launched a program...

Technology as Reform Higher education has become hire education. That is the message of a series of recent books by Richard Mitchell, Charles Sykes, Thomas Sowell, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D’Souza, and Richard Huber. All of these writers would like to see academia reformed. Their proposals range from abolishing tenure (D’Souza and Sowell) to abolishing racial...

On December 7, 1993, Colin Ferguson loaded his 9-millimeter pistol, put 160 rounds of additional ammunition in his pockets, and took a train crowded with homebound commuters to Hicksville, Long Island. There he deliberately commenced firing on the packed passengers, killing six people and wounding 17 others. As he paused to reload, two brave men...

On March 3, 1994, ABC-TV’s Nightline devoted its half hour to the question of deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews. As background, the program showed clips of newsreels from the civil rights era, the “halcyon days”—and years—of unity between Jews and blacks in the 1950’s and early 60’s. The narration then jumped to the 1980’s...

“Racism” and its derivative, “racist,” are oft-used words, and so we ought to know what they mean. But often we don’t, and we just fling them at each other, hoping they will wound, if not kill, the offensive person. One of my dictionaries (Standard College Dictionary, 1963) defines racism this way: ” 1. An excessive...

A scene from an unpublished teledrama: The Oval Office of the White House. Behind the desk, the President of the United States. He speaks into an intercom. Bill Clinton: Are there any more appointments today? Voice from the intercom: There is just one more. The park ranger in charge of the investigation into poor Vince...

The September 1991 Tailhook scandal has done more damage to the United States Navy than Admiral Sergei Gorshkov and his Soviet fleet had ever hoped to do. Although military law appears to have been violated, the escapade itself was worse than criminal—it was stupid! In this day of radical feminism, the senior officers of the...

This time around, the divine left is definitely short of ideological change. Once upon a recent time it went to sleep with uncle Stalin; much later, it began to yawn with the revisionist Trotsky, Mao, and Tito; today, it is noisily waking up to the tune of politically correct liberalism. Even a layman must raise...

My last conversation with Edward Thompson, the Marxist historian, was at the gates of Durham Castle. That, on reflection, was how it should have been. There was always something slightly grand about him, as if a castle, or at least a country mansion, might be a natural place for him. Durham Castle is now a...

Often in that period in her life, when she least expected it, she would feel the change creeping over her. It would start in the middle of an intense conversation with her younger son or with her daughter, behind whose newly finished face she saw her past and intimations of her future flickering silently, waiting...

Much as I hate to admit it, AIDS czarina Kristine Gebbie got it right. The message to youngsters these days does indeed give the impression that sex is ugly, dirty, and a more perverse than pleasurable experience. Ms. Gebbie bungled only when she took on the role of anti-Victorian-morality crusader. In the space of a...

Let us begin with the obvious: sooner or later, everyone dies. Even Bill and Hillary say they know that. No amount of money will head off the inevitable. We cannot “cure” death like we might rebuild our inner cities or clean up the air. At best, we can use modern medicine to cheat death for...

The Mercy Killing of Socialism, launched so hopefully throughout Central and Eastern Europe in 1991, has failed. Most visibly, Polish voters returned the communists to parliamentary control in 1993, while Russia swung toward a version of National Socialism. Even in the smaller but symbolically important nation of Sweden, the “conservative revolt” sparked by right-wing election...

In the Name of the Father Produced and directed by Jim Sheridan Screenplay by Terry George and Jim Sheridan Based on the autobiography of Gerry Conlon Released by Universal Pictures Franz Kafka was right about metamorphoses. The usual direction is from the human condition to something lower, the cockroach or whatever insect it was that...

My grandmother was a frugal lady. She was a warm, friendly, and loving person, but she could squeeze a dollar until George Washington’s eyes crossed. When she frosted a cake she used only half of each ingredient in the recipe, so the frosting was paper-thin and tended to disappear after a day or two, but...

At the end of the 60’s, the Establishment began a deliberate campaign to destroy a number of American symbols it considered inimical to black welfare. That these symbols—such as the various flags of the Confederate States of America and the song “Dixie”—are revered by a large section of our country for reasons not connected with...

Little does history remember the death of Vice President Garret Augustus Hobart at the tender age of 55, barely a month before the beginning of the present century. Yet we have cause to lament that, in the words of the Psalmist, this humble personage was not granted a span of 70, or even 80, years....

The demands of life are endlessly self-contradictory. It is a supreme compliment in intellectual life, for example, to be called original; but it can be alarming to discover something—so alarming that people have been known to turn tail and run when they do. To take a philosophical instance: Leibniz, as Bertrand Russell tells in his...

I was delighted in the fall of 1992 to discover a new VJ on MTV, named Kennedy, who declared herself a Republican during her first week on the air under friendly questioning from a fellow VJ. Asked whom she was voting for, she said “Bush/Quayle” with a smile—she was proud not only of the Bush...

Bittersweet feelings swept over me, a child of swing, during a recent walk down Manhattan’s Times Square after an absence of several decades. At the end of the walk (Broadway and 42nd Street) two other feelings emerged: there’s a permanence in things notwithstanding change. And all of us are, inescapably, creatures of culture. I felt...

In November 1875, in a gas-lit flat over a rain-soaked street in Tours, a law student sat together with a young Portuguese widow. They were rifling through her letters. She had been a minor actress in Bordeaux and had played at the Haymarket Theatre and elsewhere. She had had an English lover who once gave...

Evidence that Maya Angelou may have borrowed from another poem for the one she delivered at Bill Clinton’s inauguration was reported in this magazine last December. The White House, having seen the December Chronicles and the subsequent news stories about it, appears to have opted to distance itself from Angelou rather than to defend her....

Political correctness may have started in the universities, but it has begun to trickle down into other areas of American culture. I recently discovered a new series of biographies for children that includes lives not only of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln but also of former Beatles guitarist John Lennon. I also came across a...

I want to talk to people who have been shaken out of themselves by art, who have heard a piece of Mozart’s Magic Flute reach out and grab them by the heart, who have seen the grave look on Flora’s face as she steps out of Botticelli’s Primavera the way the gods always do, lit...

“I’m a trained killer,” Army Captain Mimi Finch announced during a hearing of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. A thirty-something graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, Captain Finch was the youngest member of the commission. Its job was to “assess the laws and policies...

The negative critique of American education has grown from a mere trickle back when Albert Jay Nock delivered his lectures on Theory of Education in the United States at the University of Virginia in 1931 into a roaring flash flood. When the sound and fury of the various Jeremiahs of American education have ceased echoing...

Does Massachusetts Governor William Weld want to “Empower America” or “Empower Queer Nation”? Social conservatives who hold out an inkling of hope that “Empower America” might actually pay attention to their issues should take a closer look at Governor Weld’s promotion of the homosexual agenda in public schools. On February 10, 1992, Governor Weld “empowered”...

Gun owners are often asked by friends, and rhetorically by politicians and the media, “How can you stand having a gun in your home?” Sometimes we try to bridge the gap by speaking of our love of hunting or target shooting or of our appreciation of the history and craftsmanship of firearms. But this evades...

“October Revolution” is probably an apt description of Canada’s 1993 parliamentary elections, as the month marked the enthronement of a left-oriented political establishment and the ejection of the ruling Conservatives. The Liberal Party’s sweep to an absolute majority meant the relegation of the Tory Progressive Conservative Party to virtual extinction (it now holds only two...

True Romance Produced by Samuel Hadida, Steve Perry, and Bill Unger Directed by Tony Scott Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino Released by Warner Brothers Hard Target Produced by James Jacks, Sean Daniel, Chuck Pfarrer, and Terence Chang Directed by John Woo Screenplay by Mr. Pfarrer Released by Universal Pictures Because of my enthusiasm for the verve...

St. Matthews Episcopal is a modern, manicured church set in the heart of suburban Louisville’s East End. It contrasts somewhat with the dusty farm truck sitting in its parking lot. Near the truck, half a dozen people say hello to a slender man in blue jeans and then mill around numerous apple crates filled with...

The standoff between President Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament ended in flames and gunfire that can be compared to the sad scenes of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Even the scare tactic of round-the-clock rap music was emulated by Russian spetsnats troops. Having crushed his opponents, Mr. Yeltsin returned Russia to its familiar...

“Time,” R.H. Ives Gammell wrote in The Twilight of Painting, “is a ruthless appraiser of art and, by and large, a very just one.” Gammell addressed his book “to readers disposed to consider the complete deterioration of the older forms of painting a disaster to civilization.” When he published The Twilight in 1946, Gammell’s purpose...

America’s attempts to help the former Soviet Union have proven exceptionally frustrating. Nearly all government officials. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, realize that something ought to be done. The possibility that continued economic crises will mean a return to a belligerent totalitarian state is both reasonable and justifiably dreaded. Even the most coldhearted lifelong...

There is no national holiday on April 19 (or April 18), though the Boston Marathon is run around this time. When I was in college in the East this meant not only mid-spring but midterm, and when exams were finished, the anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride seemed a perfect excuse for a party. Though I’ve...

Jurassic Park Produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Gerald R. Molen Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Michael Crichton and David Koepp Released by Universal The Fugitive Produced by Arnold Kopelson Directed by Andrew Davis Screenplay by Jeb Stuart and David Twohy Released by Warner Brothers Robert Warshow, one of the best critics of film we...

Two of the Clinton campaign’s central promises aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit and “reinventing” government. Unfortunately, President Clinton’s recently unveiled campaign finance reform plan will do neither. The most dramatic step the President could take toward accomplishing his goals would be to resist congressmen’s desires on the topic closest to their hearts: election...

When Bill Clinton picked writer Maya Angelou to create and read a poem at his swearing-in ceremony, he was given kudos by the media and academia for the “diversity” and brilliance of his selection. Many spoke of how a woman whose books (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Swingin’ and Singin and Gettin...