Category: Vital Signs

Who’s responsible for all those “Writer’s magazines”—Writer, Writer’s Digest, Writer’s Notebook, etc.—clogging the newsstands of Harvard Square? The unsuspecting peruser who comes to these periodicals seeking professional advice will be disappointed to find that they read like a cross between Norman Vincent Peale and Robotics Monthly. The truth is, writing is a rough and lonely...

Every evening, thousands of people line up just south of California’s border with Mexico. They wait for darkness to fall so they can slip across the border and illegally enter our country. The Border Patrol succeeds in catching as many as half of these people, but thousands more still succeed at illegally entering our country...

“I’m always sorry when any language is lost,” Samuel Johnson told Boswell during their tour of the Hebrides in September 1773, “because languages are the pedigree of nations.” Linguistic pride is not a dead artifact of Romantic nationalism. It is alive and well today, among the Quebecois and among the supporters of a constitutional amendment...

Zoo Produced and Directed by Frederick Wiseman Released by Zipporah Films Much Ado About Nothing Produced by Kenneth Branagh, David Parfitt, and Stephen Evans Direction and Screenplay by Kenneth Branagh Released by The Samuel Goldwyn Company Frederick Wiseman’s rigorous documentary style disdains the unctuous narrator’s voice-over explanations to the audience of what it ought to...

Unemployment and underemployment are trends becoming more noticeable as the 20th century draws to a close. Eighteen million new jobs were created in the United States during the expansionary 1980’s, but, ominously, structural unemployment—the seeming base level in our economy—was still redefined upward from 4.5 percent to 5.5 percent of the work force. Worse, new...

A hundred years from now historians, if they are still permitted to research and write, will argue about when the United States started down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. Many Southern historians believe it began with the erosion of the U.S. Constitution occasioned by President Lincoln’s disregard of that document and by the Reconstruction Era....

Robert Reich explains in “Clintonomics 101” in the view Republic that “every factor of production other than people and infrastructure is moving with ever greater ease across national boundaries.” True, our airports and sewers don’t usually pick up and leave the country, and not many Americans are heading for Ethiopia or Chile to strike it...

“Different strokes for different folks” means, in academic language, “We have our own culture, so bug off.” Europeans tell this to Americans who are curious about native habits. I remember that while teaching at Frankfurt University in 1991 I commented in a memo to colleagues on students who don’t do any reading or preparing for...

Outcome-Based Education, which has been around awhile under other names, has gradually become Big Education’s main answer to the chorus of cries for “reform” that followed the Department of Education’s publication of the A Nation at Risk report ten years ago. Its bland label is frightfully misleading. If this were a product in the grocery...

Last school year, my son—who was a fourth grader at a public school— came home with a red piece of paper entitled “Family Call to Action.” The letter on the front, preprinted by a corporation but signed by his teacher, informed me that my son would be joining the Target Stores and Hanes Corporation “Kids...

A Trojan horse has passed through the gates of the academy, virtually unnoticed. The Sinon is Keith Miller, an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University and author of Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources (1992), and the subversive offering is his essay in the January 20...

When I first read that the now late Ayatollah Khomeini had sentenced Salman Rushdie to death, I, like most of you, reacted with both horror and disgust. The leader of Iran sent out an order to kill a citizen of the United Kingdom for something he wrote about Mohammed. This was as clear a violation...

The problem of forged art, always a complicated one, has been made immeasurably more complicated in this century because of two factors. One, the appreciation of tribal art in its many varieties has coincided with the gradual disappearance of tribal living worldwide; thus some of the most vexing problems of authenticity in the art world...

I don’t like to write such, but this note will have a crotchety tone. I have found in reading David McCullough’s Truman only one misprint. On page 956 the Latin word firmissime is spelled firmissine in a Latin citation delivered on the occasion of Truman’s receiving an honorary degree from Oxford. An English translation precedes,...

Ulzana’s Raid Produced by Carter De Haven Directed by Robert Aldrich Written by Alan Sharp Released by Universal, 1972 Dances With Wolves Produced by Jim Wilson and Kevin Costner Directed by Kevin Costner Written by Michael Blake Released by Orion, 1990 No, I haven’t lost my mind, or at least that’s what I choose to...

We don’t weigh much: maybe 40, 50 pounds. We’re light compared to you. And that’s how it all got started. Some big guy got mad at Joey LaRoy down at MacNab’s Bar and Grill. He picked him up—to shake him, that’s all; but Joey bit him on the nose, and the guy threw him clear...

The recent attack on New York City’s World Trade Center has once again reinforced in Western minds that terrorism is a purely Middle Eastern phenomenon, and that terms like “Palestinian,” “Shi’ite,” and “Muslim fundamentalist” are virtual synonyms for “terrorist.” There is no room here to discuss the damage that such a view has had on...

Reservoir Dogs Produced by Lawrence Bender Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino Released by Miramax Films The Bad Lieutenant Produced by Edward Pressman Written by Abel Ferrara and Zoe Lund Directed by Abel Ferrara Released by Aries Films The way the camera turns an actor’s body into an objet d’art is wonderful. Some faces—Bogart’s, for...

On August 25, 1992, a 19-year-old woman named Rosebud Abigail Denovo broke into the campus home of Chang-Fin Tien, chancellor of the University of California. Denovo, a member of the People’s Will Direct Action Committee, was the self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner in the trial of Tien—enemy of the people. An Oakland police officer, called...

Background: The French economist and writer Frederic Bastiat used the simplest economic system he could think of, the duo of Robinson Crusoe and Friday, to illustrate the folly of protectionism in “Something Else,” one of a scries of essays he called Soplmmes économiques, published between 1844 and 1850. In the original story, Robinson’s protectionist instincts...

While addressing the 20th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this past February, I confessed unease. A recovering “environmentalist,” addressing CPAC seemed equivalent to a recovering alcoholic witnessing before Alcoholics Anonymous. My story starts with the acknowledgment that the environment is a just cause; the world deserves wise stewardship, and there are some people who...

You’re not going to believe this, but last year C-SPAN broadcast a news media get-together that did not put everyone to sleep. As a rule, soul-searching sessions of media stars, or journalistic entities, as Wes Pruden of the Washington Times calls them, end in self-congratulatory hosannas to their integrity and their courage in calling it...

Playwright Robert Sherwood, the six-foot-seven weather vane of midcentury liberalism, once complained, “The trouble with me is that I start off with a big message and end with nothing but good entertainment.” That’s no trouble at all, as writer-director Preston Sturges insisted in his wonderful film Sullivan’s Travels (1941), but then Sherwood was unduly modest....

President Bush suffered fierce attacks from conservative quarters as the 1992 election year came to a close, and many on the right even celebrated his loss. Fine enough, but after the election the message on the conference circuit and on the nation’s op-ed pages was that conservatives’ great hope for 1996 is Jack F. Kemp....

In October 1992 Commentary printed an “observation” by David Glasner, “Hayek and the Conservatives,” which abounded in glaring disinformation. The pictures there given of the America First movement as a rallying point for anti-Semitic kooks and of the Old Right as a collection of bigoted psychopaths, pending the arrival of the neoconservatives and their Hayekian...

In 1975 an eccentric old lady who lived near Brighton, England, with a Pekinese gave a taped interview about her affair in 1930 with Scott Fitzgerald. Recent Fitzgerald biographers have mentioned the evocatively named Bijou O’Conor and quoted bits from the tape, but no one has discovered anything significant about her background, appearance, or character....

For a few moments during last year’s presidential election, it appeared that the American two-party system was headed for a meltdown. As the ineffectual Bush campaign drew to its merciful close, the resurgence of support for Ross Perot defied every principle of professional political punditry. In 1992, disaffected Middle Americans were key to the 19...

Let the Buddhists have their mandalas; give the Muslims Mecca; we have The Price Is Right. Five days a week at 11:00 A.M., soaring audio and video levels, howling graphics, and dizzying camera shots herald the appearance of a ministry as fervent as any in the world. The names of the chosen few are called...

Bram Stoker’s Dracula Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Fuchs, and Charles Mulvehill Written by James V. Hart Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Distributed by Columbia Pictures A Few Good Men Produced by David Brown, Rob Reiner, and Andrew Scheinman Written by Aaron Sorkin Directed by Rob Reiner Distributed by Columbia Pictures There are advantages...

We were on the same plane out of Dulles, and he was two rows ahead. His head was shaven, except for a tuft at the very top. With large ears and long, bare cranium he looked like the Sesame Street character Bert, as in Bert and Ernie. Bert always looks worried, bored, and anxious, and...

Grappling with the meaning of the L.A. riots, wondering with Rodney King why we can’t get along, I muse about days long ago when I was a terroristette for the women’s movement. I cared so much about violence against women that, with a group of my sisters, I participated in a rampage of window-smashing, targeting...

Substance in the art world is all a matter of illusion and facade. In the maxim of La Rochefoucauld, “To establish oneself in the world one does all one can to seem established there already.” This illusion goes far beyond spending money on fancy advertising and lavish exhibitions to creating the appearance of popularity and...

One day last autumn a stray clipping reminded me that the first news from abroad that startled me in England—where, six years ago, I fled from the optimism of the New York Times as I had fled from the comparably totalitarian bonism of Pravda 12 years earlier— was not some distant rumbling of Kremlin intrigue...

Early last February, Representative John Lewis took the House floor and demanded, “How can our constituents expect Congress to address the nation’s economic ills when tens of thousands may have been embezzled and stolen right here in the Capitol? How can they expect Congress to deal with a drug epidemic if cocaine is in fact...

The music business is the latest battleground in the p.c. war—and recent events indicate that dissident or controversial musicians have no defenders in the media establishment that now controls the industry. In yet another instance of censorship by the “free-speaking” left, singer Steve Vaus has been stifled in his efforts to “Take America Back,” even...

In order to recycle the familiar repertory, the music industry must seek new markets through various gimmicks: celebrity status, special occasions, and even styles more familiar on the street than in the salon. Nigel Kennedy, the young English violinist, has recently made a hit of the Brahms Violin Concerto not because of his impressive skill...

He looks into your eyes, moves you to tears, touches your heart. You cheer, raise your hands to heaven, bring offerings of red roses and baby’s breath. Garth Brooks is conquering another audience, and country music is conquering America. Check the music charts. Brooks is passing frenetic rap, snarling rock, and slithering MTV. True, Garth...

Camille Paglia, current official Court Enemy of America’s East Coast intellectual mafia, recently went on record in the New York Times encouraging federal support of the allegedly endangered American art form of rock music. She is correct in praising rock as one of American folk art’s grand contributions to world culture. Rock is definitively American,...

“Please visit all the booths, sign X your name where needed, and look up to the sky and enjoy yourself,” said Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, just before his group finished performing at the seven-band Lollapalooza concert festival in Fairfax, Virginia, last August. All day long the sky was grey, and the...

Batman Returns Produced by Denise di Novi and Tim Burton Directed by Tim Burton Screenplay by Daniel Waters Released by Warner Brothers Monster in a Box Produced by Jon Blair and Renee Shafransky Directed by Nick Broomfield Written and Performed by Spalding Gray Released by Fine Line Features Not only had I not planned to...

Reviewing a polemical pamphlet of mine on Sovietology published by the Claridge Press in London, Arnold Beichman assured readers of the May issue of Chronicles that I am “a serious man.” The bulk of his review, however, supported the proposition that I am a conspiracy nut, a proposition whose originality the reviewer may well have...

I recently watched a television special about the life and times of Jessica Mitford, and the program took me back fifteen years or so to my first meeting with Jessica. It was mid-December, the beginning of the Christmas recess at San Jose State College, and Jessica had been informed that, at the close of the...

To study any vital religion is to address, as a matter of hypothesis, a striking example of how people explain to themselves who they are as a social entity. Religion as a powerful force in human culture is realized in society, not only or even mainly in theology. Religions form social entities—churches, peoples, “holy nations,”...

What if Pat Buchanan were to win the presidency? That prospect intrigues me. Let’s assume that Pat wins, someday. What could he do to restore the American republic? A great deal. I therefore propose my version of Pat Buchanan’s first inaugural address. It is a wonderful thing to be here in front of ail these...

Edward II Produced by Steve Clark-Hall and Antony Root Directed by Derek Jarman Screenplay by Derek Jarman, Stephen McBride, and Ken Butler Based on the play by Christopher Marlowe Released by Fine Line Features Howards End Produced by Ishmail Merchant Directed by James Ivory Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Based on the novel by E.M....

When America was closer to her democratic roots, citizens held town meetings to discuss problems and vote on policies. I was born too late to participate in any of those meetings myself, but the idea of getting together with other concerned citizens to discuss important issues has a nostalgic appeal for me. Consequently, I jumped...

Congressional reapportionment, an orgy of partisan revenge and blatant self-interest mandated every ten years by our Constitution, proved particularly ugly in 1992. In Tennessee, Texas, and other states, judges required minority-dominated districts be carved out to insure representation to blacks and Hispanics. The results left even Governor Gerry turning over in his grave. New electoral...

When I visited Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, in 1988, in what turned out to be the last year of German partition, the Soviet Union’s use of the camp for five years after World War II was hardly to be spoken of inside what, with memorable irony, was still called the German Democratic Republic; my...

Monday, 9: 30 A.M.—Arose after an evening of drinking, soft-shell Jazz and mainstream crabs: oops—dyslexia margarita. My sister’s cleaning lady arrives with an armload of Tito Puente records and an Electrolux without a muffler: I decide to skip coffee and head right to the train station: looking forward to a leisurely trip back to Boston...

My former in-laws in the United States are direct descendants of Christopher Columbus. This is fact. It will now be demonstrated. No other family in North America can make this claim. These worthy people are the Boals. Their ancestral home in America is a tiny village called Boalsburg in central Pennsylvania. I’ll attempt to explain,...