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The Country Writer
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The Country Writer

I am as grateful for this award as I am surprised by it, and I certainly did not see it coming. Obviously, it cannot be easy to feel worthy of an award bearing the name of T.S. Eliot, and so probably I ought to say that I am grateful, but unconvinced. The etiquette attendant upon...

Frederick Turner and the Rebirth of Literature
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Frederick Turner and the Rebirth of Literature

The breach that opened between the serious and popular arts during the early years of this century has so widened over subsequent decades that the current “postmodern” era is characterized by a kind of cultural schizophrenia. While visual images bombard us through the media, the graphic arts have increasingly evaporated in performance and conceptual art....

The Secret History of the Feminist Movement
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The Secret History of the Feminist Movement

The feminist movement, it has just been learned, was actually concocted by men. Specifically, a small group of planners meeting in 1962 set in motion the developments of the next 30 years concerning men and women. These men acted in a selfish spirit of personal aggrandizement. The heretofore secret minutes of their planning group are...

The Fading of Feminism
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The Fading of Feminism

Writing her column the other day in a London newspaper, a feminist confessed that the women’s movement that started some 25 years ago had “spluttered to a halt.” Many a middle-aged feminist nowadays will tell you the same thing. The young, they will say with an air of regret, meaning their daughters and the friends...

Where Have the Women All Gone?
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Where Have the Women All Gone?

“The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of women’s rights,” wrote Queen Victoria in 1870 to Sir Theodore Martin. “Woman would become the most hateful, heartless and disgusting of human beings, were she allowed to unsex herself.” Pausing only to add “fanatical” and “idiotic” to Her...

Sexual Harassment and the Academy
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Sexual Harassment and the Academy

SCENE; Administrative conference room at a major university. Five grim-faced faculty members sit around a long table and stare at THE ACCUSED, who sits at one end, apart and alone. He is well dressed, young middle-aged, nice looking but not particularly handsome. Each member of the COMMITTEE has in front of him or her a...

Pariahs and Favorites in East Central Europe
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Pariahs and Favorites in East Central Europe

“How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” —Neville Chamberlain Persons with roots in Central and Eastern Europe know that to speak with minimal competence about that part of the world...

Eyes on the Prize of Central Asia
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Eyes on the Prize of Central Asia

In August, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan announced that the capitol of the country would be moved several hundred miles north, from the green city of Almaty, where the presidential palace stands against a background of snow-capped mountains, to the bleak and windy steppes of north-central Kazakhstan, to the present city of Akmola. The official...

The Future of Kosovo
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The Future of Kosovo

The fate of Kosovo, Serbia’s troubled province, has in recent years received a good deal of attention in the world press, usually in connection with the actions of Serbia’s president, Slobodan Miloševic. A somewhat obscure communist until he became head of the Serbian Communist Party in 1986, Miloševic went to Kosovo in April 1987 to...

Uncle Sam and the Third Balkan War
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Uncle Sam and the Third Balkan War

Whenever you hear the New World Order crowd whining about the obligation of the “international community” to come to the rescue of a “multiethnic democracy” threatened by “nationalism,” get ready for Uncle Sam to be dragged off on a fool’s errand. This term, “multiethnic democracy,” the prime exemplar of which is supposedly the United States,...

Jury-Rigging
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Jury-Rigging

Throughout our legal history we are familiar with incidents of jury-tampering, the act of buying off or frightening one or more of the 12 men good and true called upon to decide a case. This is done to predetermine a verdict, usually to assure a “not guilty.” We have heard of vicious gangsters, corrupt union...

Angels to Govern Us
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Angels to Govern Us

“If men were angels,” James Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.” Or, “if angels were to govern men, no controls on government would be necessary.” Madison believed that men are about as good as they can ever be, and since no angels are available to rule, we need checks and balances. Thomas Jefferson added...

Congress vs. the Second Amendment
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Congress vs. the Second Amendment

“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” —The Second Amendment Like a recidivist criminal free to strike at will, the United States Congress slashed the Bill of Rights last year, tearing through the widely ignored Second...

Federalism vs. Secession
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Federalism vs. Secession

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.” —The Tenth Amendment Following the passage of the national gun ban wrapped in pork, Representatives Gingrich and Gephardt congratulated each other for their bipartisan cooperation and remarked...

The Russo-German Symbiosis in the First and Second World Wars
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The Russo-German Symbiosis in the First and Second World Wars

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Leninist forces within the empire, hosannas have rung out in the Western world. “The Cold War is over, the Cold War is over,” the leaders of the West have exclaimed, and demands to turn swords into knitting needles have filled the air. At every...

The Eternal Regiment
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The Eternal Regiment

World War II has been over for 50 years now. Most veterans of that war, myself included, have long put the war behind them, their sacrifices and achievements dimmed by faltering memories and the passage of time. Few people remember, including some veterans, the names or numbers of the old outfits, their combat records and...

A Solution to Crime
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A Solution to Crime

Frankly, we were skeptical when first contacted by Peter Shaw, Ph.D., a genial, tweedy, professorial type carrying a somewhat foxed and dog-eared manuscript boldly titled “My System.” It outlined, he claimed, a comprehensive solution to the leading social problems of our era. Despite appearances, the man was hard to dismiss, especially given his claim that...

The Inner Darkness
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The Inner Darkness

Every society has its mythology, its particular set of heroes and monsters. In North America over the last decade, the figure of the demon or monster has come to be represented by the serial killer, an image that is now quite ubiquitous in popular culture. In a typical chain bookstore, a B. Dalton or Waldenbooks,...

Black Murder
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Black Murder

Imagine the devastating effect, even on the mass of young black men who successfully resist the temptation to violence, of Gwen Guthrie’s song Ain’t Nothin’ Coin’ On But The Rent: Boy, nothing in life is free / That’s why I’m asking you what can you do for me / I’ve got responsibility / So I’m...

Episcopal Follies
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Episcopal Follies

We have heard many debates recently about the undermining of moral and cultural traditions in contemporary America, a trend sometimes epitomized by the phrase “political correctness.” Conservatives often issue dark warnings about the ills that befall a society that cuts itself off from its roots, though few go so far as to predict total destruction,...

Justice and Its Harvesters
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Justice and Its Harvesters

Nobody, except the New York Times and its worldwide allies, questions the right and duty of Catholic bishops to raise their public voice on moral issues, and on social issues intertwined with problems of a moral nature. Admittedly, pastoral letters, monita, even encyclicals sound rather hollow today, like trumpets in the desert, laments in a...

The New Scapular
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The New Scapular

When I was in Catholic high school, some 15 years ago, even as the last of the marble altars were being pulled out of America’s churches, the ornate wooden confessionals uprooted in favor of plywood-and-plexiglass “reconciliation rooms,” one devotional custom persisted from centuries before, in the undershirts and blouses of the Vinnics, Patricks, and Marias...

Jerry Brown Talks
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Jerry Brown Talks

On July 7 Chronicles sent freelance writer Jim Christie to interview Jerry Brown in Oakland, California. Ask any Democratic Party insider in California about Jerry Brown, and he will usually say Brown is one of three things; an embarrassment, a flake, or a jerk. The institutional meanness, the state party’s party line, toward the former...

The Impotent American Voter
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The Impotent American Voter

Our great-great-grandfathers, if they were American voters, enjoyed greater opportunity to change policy with their votes than we do today. It is a paradox that as the number of Americans permitted to vote has increased over the past century, the power of those votes has diminished. Many legislators and judges, in their hearts, do not...

Political Trust-Busting
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Political Trust-Busting

In the “nihilistic politics of the 1990’s,” warns a newswriter for the Wall Street Journal, “party loyalty counts for almost nothing.” The writer means obeisance to the two major parties, which the civics books imply are ordained by God to rule us. In fact, America needs a breakup of this two-party system, which looks more...

Grassroots Extremism
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Grassroots Extremism

“Extremist” is a word that may conjure up images of hooded Klansmen crowded around a burning cross or of Black Panther separatists or kooky 60’s “revolutionaries.” Or perhaps images of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao come to mind. There is a supposition that those who are commonly called “extremists” are unreasonable, irrational, perhaps crazy, and quite...

Russophilia
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Russophilia

The deluge of statements, articles, and books on Russia in these turbulent (for Russia) times comes as no surprise. What surprises is the ingratiating and monotonously uncritical terms of discourse in which American opinions about Russia are couched. Many of these terms date back to the Soviet era. No country in Europe has ever generated...

The Unknown Civil War
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The Unknown Civil War

The use of NATO military strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, at the urgings of the Clinton administration, camouflages for the moment a rift that has occurred in the Western alliance. Sooner or later recriminations over “who lost Yugoslavia?” are certain to come. And though it may be a while before historians render a verdict, there...

Triberalism
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Triberalism

After three decades in which the term “liberal Democratic media” has come to seem an almost complete redundancy, many students of American journalism today are no doubt stunned to learn that, prior to the 1960’s, this nation’s printed press was regarded by most prominent liberals and Democrats as a bastion of conservatism and Republicanism. When...

Speaking Truth to Power
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Speaking Truth to Power

Why is there no adversarial press in the United States? Why do the media seem so afraid of news stories that threaten to embarrass or destroy governments? These questions may seem curious in a society that prides itself on freedom of the press and where the media are often criticized for excessively negative criticism of...

Mass Media, Mass Conformity
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Mass Media, Mass Conformity

I take a certain amount of gleeful satisfaction—the Germans call it Schadenfreude—in the schisms and divisions that seem increasingly to bedevil the American right. The pitched battles between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives, between libertarians and authoritarians, and, of late, between social conservatives of the fundamentalist Christian persuasion and traditional economic royalists who care much more about...

The Politics of Education and the Metaphysics of Emptiness
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The Politics of Education and the Metaphysics of Emptiness

The president of a prominent liberal arts college recently conveyed to its philosophy department (and to other constituencies) that regulations may soon be in place which would influence, if not altogether control, the conferring of bachelor’s degrees. Mandated by the federal government, these “guidelines” would have a strongly utilitarian bias. However supportive this might be...

All Such Filthy Cheats
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All Such Filthy Cheats

When Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman announced on January 18 his decision not to pursue confirmation as Secretary of Defense, he repeated Robert Massie’s old charge that William Safire is a plagiarist, saying this “does not, in my judgment, put [Safire] in a position to frame moral judgment on any of us, in or out...

Technovandals and the Future of Libraries
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Technovandals and the Future of Libraries

There are discussions at all levels of government about the future of libraries. The federal government is proceeding with plans for the I-WAY (otherwise known as the National Information Superhighway), blithely assuming that it will, at a time and cost and in a manner unknown, supersede most if not all library services and programs. It...

To Hell With Culture
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To Hell With Culture

“The corruption of man,” Emerson wrote, “is followed by X the corruption of language.” The reverse is true, and a century later Georges Bernanos had it right: “The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.” How pertinent this is about so many matters present, including the use of the word culture. My conservative...

The First Arkansas Bill
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The First Arkansas Bill

“The Price of Empire is America’s soul and that price is too high.” —Senator J. William Fulbright August 8, 1967 The oily whoremaster in the White House dodged the draft thanks to another Arkansas Oxonian named Bill, but the debt remains unpaid. For the shirker is viciously conventional, as the ambitious young always are, while...

Life in the Old Right
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Life in the Old Right

One problem with labeling ideological movements “old” or “new” is that inevitably, with the passage of time, the “new” becomes an “old” and the markers get confusing. In the modern, post-World War II right wing, there have been a number of “news” and hence “olds” over the past half-century. But what I call the “Old...

The Other Black History
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The Other Black History

On May 13, Florida Governor Lawton Chiles signed into law a measure requiring public schools to teach black history. The black history law requires lessons on slavery, the passage of slaves to America, abolition, and the contributions of blacks to American society. “The history of African-Americans must not be minimized or trivialized,” Chiles said. “The...

The Southern Tradition and the Black Experience
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The Southern Tradition and the Black Experience

I am, to say the least, honored to receive your Richard Weaver Award and to be invited to share some thoughts with you tonight. Richard Weaver observed, in Ideas Have Consequences: “There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. . . . For four centuries every man has been not...

Yahoo Justice
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Yahoo Justice

The Supreme Court that has recently issued its anti-harassment decision sits in the middle of a city under siege. Justices who have pronounced the nation’s employers liable for “permitting a hostile environment” to exist in the workplace cannot walk within two blocks of the Supreme Court building without being confronted with the most hostile of...

The Puritanism That Dare Not Speak Its Name
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The Puritanism That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Every society places some kind of restriction on personal conduct, and limitations are usually most visible in the areas of sexual behavior and the use or abuse of particular foods or intoxicants. Restrictions might be formal and legal, perhaps enforced by a specialized morality police or vice squad, or there may be informal social sanctions...

From Health Care to Discrimination
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From Health Care to Discrimination

As we try to improve our lives with a national health care plan we must not forget the “law of unintended consequences” to which Robert Merton alerted us in 1936. Two examples illustrate the danger. Few people foresaw that federal support for poor mothers with dependent children would contribute to the breakup of black families,...

The Clinton Diagnosis
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The Clinton Diagnosis

For more than two decades, critics of the American health care system have been unrelenting in their charge that it is a singular failure and manifestly unfair. We are told that millions of our fellow citizens have no access to basic medical services and that our very survival as a nation is threatened by the...

The Nightmare of Socialized Medicine
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The Nightmare of Socialized Medicine

Vladimir Lenin enacted universal, “cradle-to-grave” health coverage in the Soviet Union in 1918. The “right to health” was made one of the constitutional rights of all Soviet citizens; it ranked alongside the “right” to vacation, free dental care, housing, and a clean and safe environment. As in other fields, all services were to be planned...

Medical Control, Medical Corruption
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Medical Control, Medical Corruption

The vested interests are sick over it: Americans are beginning, just slightly, to take charge of their own health care. Such best-sellers as the Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies, the Physician’s Desk Reference, and the Merck Manual can keep you out of the doctor’s appropriately named waiting room, or at least help you understand what...

Writer and Community
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Writer and Community

Most writers feel honored by literary prizes—in the way I feel so honored by the award of the T.S. Eliot prize—whether they accept them or not. At the same time, many writers share the wish that their vocation could be carried on anonymously. By the time they have become suitably proficient at their art and...

Showdown at Gettysburg
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Showdown at Gettysburg

Sitting through a showing of the recent film Gettysburg in a multiplex theater amid the abstract sprawl of suburban Yankeedom was somehow an unnerving experience. I don’t mean to say that the movie itself was off-putting or unsuccessful, though come to think of it, there were a few awkward moments here and there. No, the...

Donald Davidson and the Calculus of Memory
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Donald Davidson and the Calculus of Memory

The opening scene of the folk opera Singin’ Billy, for which Donald Davidson wrote the book and lyrics, takes place in the yard of Callie Wilkins, “Miss Callie,” the matriarch of Oconee Town in Pickens County, South Carolina. Two young people have married, John and Jennie Alsop, and are in danger of a shivaree. They...

Andrew Lytle and the Cultivation of American Letters
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Andrew Lytle and the Cultivation of American Letters

The name of Andrew Lytle should be better known than it is: he has been a distinguished novelist and author of some widely anthologized short stories; an essayist, historian, and memoirist; an editor of the Sewanee Review for many years; and a teacher of creative writing at the University of Florida and the University of...

When Lorena Bobbitt Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbing Along
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When Lorena Bobbitt Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbing Along

Dear Howard Stern, I don’t care if your New Year’s Eve program did set the all-time world record for a pay-for-view TV event. And I don’t care, either, if your book is a best-seller and people are lining up around the block to get a signed copy of it. I just want to tell you,...