Category: Vital Signs

When the mode of music changes, Plato remarked, the walls of the city shake.  When the mode of music changed back in the 1950’s, the denizens of Plato’s Pad—sorry, but there are so few opportunities to get in an allusion to The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis these days—and their peers saw more fingers than...

Who are the spear-carriers of government policies?  This is a tale that puts pieces together over the course of a few decades.  Neocons eat stories like this for breakfast. Like most teachers, I have learned at least as much from my students as they have learned from me.  An Argentinian graduate student at St. Louis...

A half-century ago, in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), the Supreme Court referred to the “basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution” as “settled doctrine” and “a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system.”  If the Founding Fathers were rolling in their graves in 1958, they...

Last December, Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams was roundly criticized for publicly denying the Christmas story.  “Archbishop Says Nativity a Legend,” the Daily Telegraph headline screamed, igniting a transatlantic controversy over the ostensibly Grinch-like prelate. In fact, the archbishop of Canterbury was pointing out that much of the popular imagery surrounding the Nativity scene is not...

James Stewart was born 100 years ago, on May 20, 1908, the same week that Constantin Stanislavski published his “grammar” of acting at the Moscow Arts Theatre, essentially an effort to formulate a codified, systematic approach by which the actor psychologically wrenches himself into “becoming” his fictional character.  There is no doubt in my mind...

In a private conversation before the release of the motu proprio “Summorum Pontificum,” a leading personality of U.K. Catholicism predicted that the reinstatement of the Traditional Latin Mass would grant again such an abundant flow of graces that it would even effect the restoration of society on sound Christian principles.  While that outcome remains to...

Welfare reform was supposed to discourage unmarried child­bearing.  However, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recently disclosed that out-of-wedlock births are at a record high.  The Census Bureau also reports that, for the first time, married couples constitute less than half of the nation’s households.  Thus, whatever the budgetary savings over the past ten...

One may recall one’s family album, and the endless quarrels with the love of one’s life over which photographs would best fill its pages.  The very substantiality of that omnibus of photism, with its impositions of ormolu, its house-proud monograms, its smug little pasteboard corners to hold the pictures in place, and all its forbidding,...

A debate has broken out over the continuing viability of the “fusion” of libertarians and conservatives.  If the latter are represented by President George W. Bush and the 109th Congress, the alliance seems dead.  Concocting a coalition of libertarians and liberals isn’t going to be any easier, however.  Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute has attempted...

We all know that religious believers are fools who will tell themselves anything to prop up their preconceived notions, while atheists are hard-headed rationalists who look the evidence in the face and follow the Truth no matter the cost.  Still, one’s faith in this common narrative of the chattering classes is shaken from time to...

Unlike the 1990’s, when the turmoil from the breakup of Yugoslavia dominated the security agenda of the United States and her NATO allies, subsequent years have been relatively quiet.  The civil war in Bosnia has not flared up since the conclusion of the Dayton Accords in late 1995.  Albania, which teetered on the brink of...

Mainstream economics “experts” constantly attempt to lull the fears of anybody worried at seeing our manufacturing sector relocated abroad and our factories turned into ghost towns.  They invoke Adam Smith’s arguments against mercantilism, arguing that it is a matter of free trade, that free trade always is the best policy, and insist that “protectionism” is...

I am gratified that the long-awaited motu proprio from Pope Benedict, urging a wider celebration of the Tridentine Rite, is out.  I’m happy for those, including my son, who love to worship in that way.  More power to ’em.  Some of the loveliest Catholics I know are devotees of the Tridentine Rite. That said, I was...

I’m hiding out—from the Census Bureau.  True, they usually don’t send out U.S. marshals with guns and handcuffs.  But I’m playing it safe anyway, because the Bureau has been after me since I failed to fill out its treasured questionnaire, “The American Community Survey.” I’ve been through this before.  I don’t mind if the government...

In June 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Kelo v. City of New London, depriving property owners of rights that virtually everyone has always assumed they had.  Very soon—before you can say “sequel to Lawrence v. Texas”—the Supreme Court will no doubt take up the issue of same-sex marriage.  You think...

Step back from the home-theater system for a moment and try to wrap your brain around this one: Just a couple of generations ago, high-tech “home entertainment” consisted solely of words and sounds delivered to the household via a static-plagued monophonic speaker.  Even if you remember it firsthand, you might be starting to wonder if...

Probably, we should drop the whole Dukie mess.  After killing enough trees to paper over the Western world and using up enough nonrenewable energy to fight at least a little war someplace, nothing has changed in the Research Triangle.  Duke is still as expensive as ever, as “highly rated” as ever, and its lacrosse team...

One can safely claim that Leo Strauss was an enigmatic man, since he prided himself on being enigmatic.  He raised the art of double-talk to the dignity of a requisite for any serious philosophizing: For him, it took stupidity or insignificance for a (self-proclaimed) philosopher to be able to afford to write or speak in...

Since the days of Earl Warren, the U.S. Supreme Court has engaged in a lot of freewheeling jurisprudence: the decision granting Washington the power to dictate when and how police may apprehend criminal suspects; the declaration that the racial integration of America’s public schools is a matter of federal, rather than state, law; the ukase...

If five whites carjacked a black couple, tortured them for hours, then dumped the bodies, the national news media would descend upon the benighted city in which the dastardly crime occurred and, having reported the unspeakable deeds, subject the rest of us to rants on racism and harangues on hate.  It happened with James Byrd,...

Whatever President Bush says about the “family values” of the growing horde of illegal Mexican immigrants, chilling newspaper accounts and cold data tell a different tale. On April 29, 2005, an illegal alien from Guatemala, Ronald Douglas Herrera Castellanos, was power washing a deck at the Nagle home in New City, New York.  In her...

Literary feuds, like ideas, have consequences.  After Sir Walter Scott read a disparaging review of his Marmion in the Edinburgh Review, the bard of the Borders decided that what British life needed above all was a journal that would give his works more respectful treatment and would provide a powerful antidote to the Whiggish and...

Casino Royale Produced by Barbara Broccoli, Andrew Noakes, and Anthony Waye Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis Based on the novel by Ian Fleming Released by Columbia Pictures It is with great trepidation and some sadness that I must announce that James Bond is dead.  Granted, there is...

As any connoisseur of the manifest absurdities that daily emanate from Inside the Beltway is well aware, what we read in the venerable Congressional Record is not necessarily a verbatim account of what was stated, on any given day, by our lawmakers on the floors of the House or Senate.  It is common practice to...

Almost nobody thinks that Yankees can possibly understand agrarians.  But one of the great pleasures in my life is that I was, at least at one time or another, Mel Bradford’s favorite Yankee.  And because Mel introduced me with great good manners to Mr. Andrew Nelson Lytle, I became one of his favorite Yankees, too....

Back in October, Democrats and Republicans, following the release of the nation’s employment numbers by the U.S. Department of Labor, retreated into their usual preelection fantasia.  Democrats trotted out the class-warfare tropes, while Republicans continued living in their dreamworld, where increased employment in the service industry—such as insurance companies and doctors’ offices—can make up for...

Just before Election Day, the Washington Post’s website featured a photo of President Bush landing in Bentonville, Arkansas, for a campaign stop.  Why Bush thought going to Bentonville would help pachyderm prospects, we are not given to know, but we do know that Bush and the town’s most notorious corporate resident, Wal-Mart, are helping another...

Serbian voters have approved a new constitution that, among other things, reaffirms Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo, which, since the NATO bombing of 1999, has been administered by the United Nations with the help of NATO troops.  The referendum’s passage will further complicate the efforts of Western policy-makers to grant independence to Kosovo since to do...

Tipping points have occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia that signal the beginning of a meltdown of the American Empire. In war, a “tipping point” may be defined as an event so dramatic, often so unexpected, that it has a psychological impact on the momentum of the war itself.  It adversely affects the morale of...

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES on writ of certiorari to the court of appeals June 26, 2013 (Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court.) The jurisprudence of liberty is a bright and shining star.  Its twinkling arc across the sky of our constitutional polity signals the nation’s fundamental commitment to the...

The United States, of all Western legal systems, is probably the harshest on manufacturers, at least insofar as they can be held liable for millions or even billions of dollars in damages for unanticipated defects in their products.  Until about the middle of the 20th century, liability standards in this country were not significantly different...

The death on April 25 at the age of 89 of Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and several other books, has already set off a debate over her legacy.  Admirers from the New Urbanist movement see her primarily as an advocate for compact, vibrant cities.  They cite Jacobs...

The neoconservatives have promoted an aggressive U.S. foreign policy that they term “benevolent global hegemony.”  In other words, they demand, to paraphrase Pat Buchanan, “an empire, not a republic.” What makes the American Empire an unprecedented historical phenomenon—the one instance in which the creed of American Exceptionalism holds true—is that the U.S. government, unlike previous...

Though Chesterton disliked socialism intensely, he did not regard it as the most serious danger facing Western civilization.  Writing in 1925, he describes the socialist state as something “centralized, impersonal, and monotonous” but suggests that this is also an accurate description of the societies in the modern industrialized West that regard themselves as enemies of...

In regard to the recent controversy over illegal immigration, allow me to offer a few liberal proposals. The problem could be easily and immediately solved by putting all illegal aliens to work constructing a wall across the entire southern border.  (They make up 25 percent of the construction industry, anyway.)  And, at below minimum wages,...

The Washington Post calls it “The New Reality.”  Today, women aren’t just flying fighter aircraft or serving on ships, away from action on the ground: They fight in ground combat units, lose limbs, and die in battle.  Amputee Lt. Dawn Halfaker, the main subject of the Post’s article (“Limbs Lost to Enemy Fire, Women Forge...