Category: Vital Signs

My dog does not understand cars.  An alarmist where a vacuum cleaner or thunder is concerned, a realist in regard to tomcats and other dogs, she simply lacks any concept of this genuine menace to her mortal tenure.  If you let her, she will dash across a street the instant the impulse takes her, absolutely...

“He was a wicked man, but the Lord forgave him.”  One fine spring day in my sophomore year of college, I joined my paternal grandmother on her more-or-less daily walk from her house out to the cemetery of my parent’s hometown in Eastern North Carolina.  This was her characteristically pointed and Christian evaluation of a...

It has been over a year since Chronicles published my piece “Happy Holidays?  Bah! Humbug!” (Vital Signs, December 2001) and Vdare.com used it to announce its 2001 War Against Christmas Competition.  I am still receiving mail on the essay, and I thought I would give Chronicles readers an idea of how the War Against Christmas...

Recently, I read some words that were spoken by Saint Macarius, a fourth-century monk who expresses so powerfully what God in Jesus Christ came and continues to come to do among us: When man falls under the power of the darkness of the devil’s night, he is troubled and distressed by the dreadful wound of...

Terrorists have turned down the heat in my office.  After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economy took a header, tax revenues in Illinois declined, and my university’s budget was cut.  One of our cost-saving measures has been to turn down thermostats all across campus.  Supposedly, this heat recision is targeted to just 68...

Gods and Generals Produced and Directed by Ronald F. Maxwell Screenplay by Ronald F. Maxwell from Jeff Shaara’s book  Released by Warner Bros. The war of 1861-65 is still the pivotal event of American history, despite all that has passed since.  In the extent of mobilization, casualties, and material destruction on American soil, in the...

Nineteen-ninety-one was an exhilarating year.  The simultaneous col-lapse of the Soviet regime and the apartheid system in South Africa appeared an unexpected international bonanza for moral activists, both liberal and conservative.  Outstanding accounts were miraculously settled.  The gloomy predictions of trade and race wars were swept aside.  Old verities were dusted off and promoted as...

Keeping up with technology is tricky.  Sometimes, you find information in a press release; other times, you ascertain the full measure of what is going on through obscure legal and scientific papers, last-minute legislative “riders,” and seemingly inconsequential blurbs in the foreign press.  Even as my piece on implantable identification tags was going to press...

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  For proof of this axiom, we need only look at the foreign policy pursued by the U.S. government since the end of World War II. The United States emerged from World War II militarily victorious but politically deformed.  Instead of a republic, it was now a...

It seems ironic that a man identified with the cause of states’ rights and the South’s quest for self-determination attended a school in the heartland of Yankee centralism.  Yet John C. Calhoun was Yale man, a graduate of the Congregationalist institution that formed part of the intellectual center of New England’s eventual domination over the...

While a long parade of executives has exchanged tailored pinstripes for orange jumpsuits, an even more deserving group of miscreants have thus far eluded their just deserts—those executives’ Wall Street overlords, who wrote the script for the latest and greatest of bull markets, directed the hucksters, and set their standards. The excesses of the bull...

“I don’t care who didn’t play for the American team,” boasted Dejan Bodiroga, captain of the Yugoslav national team that won the gold medal on September 8 at the 2002 World Basketball Championship for Men in Indianapolis.  “That is their problem, not ours.  We won the game, and that’s what only matters.  If they want to...

I was part of a group of several hundred social workers, nurses, and other community health-care providers whose employers shelled out a lot of money for a conference that promised to help us work more effectively with “minority populations.”  In fact, precious little attention was paid to the people with whom we work.  Instead, for six...

Bathed in the harvest-gold floodlights of Spring Grove, Minnesota’s century-old opera house, Pop Wagner looks more like an American cowboy of the 19th century than the subject of the Remington painting that adorns his set.  A few minutes before showtime, he makes one last inspection.  Gazing out across the sparsely appointed, tin-ceilinged auditorium, he tests...

The first chapter of the Bible forms the basis of the Christian understanding of the nature and dignity of man—and woman: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).  The next verse contains the first command given to the...

After decades of outward socio-cultural differences and political animosity, North America’s two United States—north and south of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo—are becoming more socially homogenous than some would care to admit. Mexico’s economic disparity has been the most extreme in all of Latin America, a social stratification described by George Baker as “equivalent to the...

The IRS and the federal tax code have enabled the blessings of government on a scale never envisioned by the Founding Fathers.  Consider the vital contributions to the current status of the federal government and its future prospects for growth made possible by the tax code, generally, and progressive taxation, in particular. First, the incredible...

Applied Digital Solutions (ADS) announced in March that it had filed for FDA approval of its tiny ID implant, VeriChip, and the Florida-based company performed its first commercial implant on three local children on May 10, promising “easy access of medical rec-ords.” While both announcements were greeted with surprise, ADS had already revealed that it...

Every form of original American music in the 20th century began in the South: bluegrass, country, western, jazz, blues, rockabilly, and rock ’n’ roll.  Even rap, pop, and heavy metal have been successful because they, in some way, use or imitate a Southern musical element.  These styles, if they can be called that, started out...

Editor’s Note: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which President Bush signed into law on July 30, is designed to increase corporate responsibility.  It is a step in the right direction, but it fails to address the central role played by Wall Street.  Some CEOs and CFOs may go to jail, but, as usual, the people...

Don Fortunato di Noto is a well-known Italian Catholic priest who has served as a leader in the fight against pedophilia for years, so much so that even Newsweek has acknowledged his work in a lengthy article.  As founder and president of the helpline Telefono Arcobaleno, he has forcefully decried the abuse of children as...

At dinner, ten-year-old Johnny is sullen and uncommunicative.  It has been a bad day.  His parents pass off his ill humor as “going through a phase.”  Actually, it was an easy day—taken up with “another stupid school assembly.”  Johnny had sat there, bored, listening to people drone on about diversity and tolerance.  When a lesbian...

The declining National Council of Churches, once the mouthpiece of America’s mainline Protestant denominations, is struggling to find a new purpose.  At its May 2002 board meeting, the NCC discussed its latest ecumenical outreach, an attempt to incorporate Roman Catholics and evangelicals.  Called “Christian Churches Together in the U.S.A.: An Invitation to a Journey,” the...

Official history venerates Abraham Lincoln as an apostle of American democracy who waged war on the South to preserve the Union and free the slaves.  Official history is a lie. Lincoln was a dictator who destroyed the Old Republic and replaced the federal principles of 1789 with the ideological foundations of today’s welfare/warfare state.  His...

There seems to be a common theme in modern libertarian thought that stresses the merits of giant corporate enterprises, claiming that they are infinitely superior to smaller, less capitalized, local businesses.  One article that I read extolled the virtues of chain bookstores versus their benighted independent “competition.”  My interest here is personal: I work part-time...

In 1960, novelist John Steinbeck circled the country in a pickup truck with a standard-bred poodle named Charley in a sort of cultural vision quest.  What he found was not always a pretty sight. His observations, published as Travels With Charley: In Search of America, included the prediction that his fellow Californians would lose the...

A remarkable yet unreported trend in U.S. politics over the past decade is the balance-of-power held by conservative political parties in federal elections, if we define balance-of-power as a vote total equal to or greater than the difference in votes between the Democratic and Republican candidates in a race.  Some media pundits noted that Green Party...

I first learned of the improbably named Smedley Darlington Butler while attending Marine Corps boot camp in South Carolina.  At Parris Island, we were taught that Butler was, along with Dan Daly, one of two U.S. Marines to have been awarded the Medal of Honor twice.  Along with five-time Navy Cross recipient Louis B. “Chesty” Puller,...

It is often said that former Princeton president Jonathan Edwards, the man credited with setting fire to the tinderbox that became the First Great Awakening, was a fiery preacher.  His message was certainly incendiary, but by modern standards he was nothing of the sort. According to minister Victor Shepherd, Edwards may have “thundered like a...

On February 12, an endorsement of the United States’ war against terrorism, organized by the “nonpartisan” Institute for American Values, went out to President Bush and the national media over the signatures of what the U.S. State Department described as “sixty prominent U.S. academics.”  The term “prominent academic” can now be applied to Bill Kristol,...

In the historical memory of Central and Eastern European peoples, the words “Muslim” and “Islam” often evoke images of terror and violence.  Derided by leftist and liberal intellectuals as “xenophobic,” these negative images are still associated with the Turks and their centuries-long military incursions into the heart of Europe.  Even the verbal derivatives of the...

In the months since the attacks of September 11, 2001, we have heard a great deal about the need to repair the intelligence walls that should have been defending America.  There is no question that the United States needs a much stronger and more proactive intelligence apparatus, both foreign and domestic, and I, for one,...

Three days before the world “changed forever,” U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson tried to put a pretty face on a lackluster summit that had just ended in Durban, South Africa.  The nine-day conference, designed to address “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” was doomed when the United States and Israel withdrew over objections...

When you’ve done something pretty bad, or nothing particularly good, the best defense is a good offense.  Attack mode works better than the smoothest excuses—God forbid you should ever apologize!—to obscure your faults and silence criticism before it is even uttered.  Thus we find that the loudest complainers in our midst are those who caused...

How did big corporations become the prevailing form of enterprise in the United States?  The standard answer is that bigger is better.  Concentrated industry, we are told, allows managerial efficiency, huge economies of scale, and the ability to undertake bold research and development and apply it to better products and increasingly efficient process technology.  But...

Judge Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, is in big trouble again.  Judge Moore’s first 15 minutes of fame happened when, as a lower-court judge, he refused to remove a plaque containing the Ten Commandments from the wall of his courtroom.  The plaque, it was said, amounted to an impermissible establishment of...

Americans regularly accept expropriations—legal, moral, and economic—from the central government that would have driven our 18th- and 19th-century ancestors to arms.  The Constitution reserves to the states and local communities all powers necessary to provide legal protection for valuable ways of life.  These rights have been usurped by the central government, especially by the Supreme...

Until recently, the English city of Leicester was definitely not the sort of place that attracted tourists.  It was a generic English town, neither a beneficiary of a high-tech boom, nor (especially) a victim of industrial collapse.  Its sense of Midland stolidity was reflected in the city’s motto: Semper Eadem, always the same. Over the...

As a display of “America Standing Together,” “Everybody Pile on Falwell” was even more dramatic a spectacle than “Three Firemen Holding the Flag.”  Following televised remarks by the founder of the Moral Majority to the effect that the terrorist attacks of September 11 conveyed God’s wrath against a nation that has been commandeered by heretics...

Before publishing his essay “The Lonely Superpower” (Foreign Affairs, 1999), Samuel Huntington had spoken more candidly in an address to the American Enterprise Institute in May 1998.  On that occasion, he had identified himself as an old-fashioned Burkean conservative. Huntington’s central thesis is that “global politics has now moved from a brief unipolar moment at...

The justification for the vast, intrusive, and coercive powers employed by the government of the United States against its citizens—from affirmative action to hate-crimes legislation, from multilingualism to multiculturalism, from Waco to Ruby Ridge—is the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution adopted in 1868, or, more specifically, the authority conferred upon Washington, explicitly or implicitly,...

“Beware the people weeping / When they bare the iron hand”  —Herman Melville, “The Martyr” It is one of the most famous photographs of the nineteenth century: Alexander Gardner’s picture of four hooded figures dangling from a gallows in the old federal penitentiary in Washington, D.C. on July 7, 1865.  On that sweltering afternoon, about...

A kid today, if he aspires to anything other than slack itself, aspires to one of three “crafts”: acting, sports, or rock ’n’ roll.  He wants either to play a part, to play a game, or to play guitar.  He wants to be a player.  The work ethic has been replaced by the shirk-and-perks ethic: “I’d...

On January 11, 2001, 40-year-old Terence Hunter was arrested by the New York Police Department for writing a letter to Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari, criticizing him for closing a community center in a black neighborhood.  According to the New York Times, Hunter, a Staten Island resident, was charged with “aggravated harassment” because he...

Michael Novak has repeatedly argued (recently, in a lecture here at Elizabethtown College) that our economic system is “permanently attached to a Judeo-Christian culture,” but history suggests otherwise.  Although capitalism developed within a Christian culture, it has also actively undermined that culture’s moral and spiritual foundations, as the use of the market by the entertainment...

Biographers do much of their work in the study and the library, but they also get to some out-of-the-way places.  I’ve interviewed people in bars, nursing homes, and insane asylums, chased down wealthy informants in country houses and elegant apartments, poor ones in drafty cottages and cluttered flats.  Some welcomed me with a hefty drink,...

Following the terrorist attacks last September, matters have been moving much too fast for a monthly periodical to have any hope of keeping up with events.  It may be that, by the time these words appear in print, world affairs will have been restored to happy equilibrium, justice will have triumphed, and the severed heads...

Peaceful Valley is a bucolic residential neighborhood in Clemson, South Carolina.  The middle-class homeowners who live there are not land speculators hoping to turn a profit.  Many are like Kathleen Dickel, a 50-year-old high-school German teacher, who owns a two-story contemporary house with a deck surrounded on two sides by deep woods.  Kathleen stained the...

After almost a century of dealing with international terrorism—since communism, in practice as well as in theory, is hardly anything more complex than terrorism on a global scale—Western democracies should have caught on to the fact that all social movements, particularly those perceived as spontaneous, are invariably organized, manipulated, and directed by those whose interests...