Some years ago, when I was a consular officer in the once-notorious border city of Tijuana, I spent a few days in Mexico City on my way back from a temporary assignment in Matamoros, another border town just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. At a social function, I was cornered by a typically...
That one can find Christian bookstores in nearly every shopping mall is doubtless a good sign. While our intellectual and cultural establishments refuse to factor God into their equations, there is an alternative network of publishing houses and bookstores devoted entirely to religion. While millions of ordinary Americans have stopped reading altogether, Christians, particularly conservative...
“If Stephen King, John Grisham, and Michael Crichton got together, they’d become one of the top three publishers overnight” —Morgan Entrekin, quoted in The New Yorker Tony Outhwaite’s article pretty much says it all, a whole lot of it anyway, about the present state of American publishing. And he’s not only right...
University presses are in trouble these days. Beset by a decline (intellectual and numerical) in the specialized academic readership to which they have always catered, encountering rising production and overhead costs, and supported with fewer and fewer dollars from their parent administrations, many of them now face the prospect of closing their doors or remaking...
Allow me to begin with a personal recollection. I first came to know the city of Chicago and the region of the Great Lakes almost 50 years ago, in 1949, when I was 23 years old. Nothing then destined me for a literary career. I am a writer who developed late. Having regrettably neglected my...
Rockford, Illinois, the home of The Rockford Institute and Chronicles, was established in a series of migratory ripples: first Yankees, then Scots, then Swedes. A later wave of immigration brought many Italians, both from Sicily and Northern Italy. Today, German-Americans are the largest ethnic group in Rockford, as they are in the United States as...
In their British North America (BNA) Act of 1867, the Fathers of Canada’s confederation produced a work of genius. The two senior levels of government were awarded separate and exclusive powers: Ottawa over national matters; provincial governments over property and civil rights and “generally all matters of a merely local or private nature in the...
He who writes a nation’s history also controls its future—so wrote George Orwell. During the Soviet reign over Eastern Europe, every citizen knew who was in charge of writing history, especially that dealing with the victims of World War II. Anyone professing to be a Slovak, a Croat, a Ukrainian, or a Russian nationalist was...
Now that communism is dead, a new specter is haunting much of Europe—the specter of nationalism. In several countries, for the first time since World War II, what may be conveniently termed nationalist, right-wing, populist parties are on the verge of coming to power, or at least of gaining respectable numbers of seats in government....
On December 16, 1962, Ayn Rand delivered a lecture at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston entitled “The Fascist New Frontier.” She began by quoting from an unidentified political platform which demanded profit-sharing, government care for the aged, legislation favorable to small businesses, government scholarships, public health and “the Common Good before the Individual Good.”...
For the last several months, a war crimes trial has been unfolding in Bordeaux in Southwest France. The defendant, Maurice Papon, an octogenarian on the verge of cardiac arrest, was the subprefect of the Gironde during the Vichy regime. At that time Papon and his superior, Maurice Sabatier, oversaw the deportation of thousands of Jews...
Something extraordinary has happened over the last decade or so—something neither the Republican nor Democratic leadership seems to understand. A large and growing number of Americans are now openly saying that much of what the central government does is not simply wasteful, corrupt, and destructive but illegitimate as well. This year the central government will...
What one man in America can decide that prisoners in South Carolina need croquet fields and backgammon tournaments and order the state to provide them? What one man can decide that Kansas City schools need Olympic-size swimming pools, a planetarium, a model United Nations wired for language translations, a temperature-controlled art gallery, and movie editing...
Land of Albania! Let me bend mine eyes On thee, thou rugged nurse of savage men! —Byron, Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage ALBANIAN ANARCHY! BALKAN BLOODBATH! Typical banners to newspaper stories of the riots and virtual civil war that gripped “Europe’s most bizarre country” during 1997, culminating in the forced resignation of Sali...
“For any displeasure, that they apprehend to be done unto them by their neighbours, they take up a plain field against him, and (without respect to God, King, or commonweal) bang it out bravely, he and all his kin, against him and all his.” —King James VI of Scotland, Basilikon Doron...
In this age of multiculturalism and sensitivity, there is one bigotry still tolerated: anti-Catholicism. As Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Peter Viereck, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan have all observed, anti-Catholicism remains our nation’s deepest bias, and the only one found respectable by intellectuals. The anti-Catholicism that marked our nation’s founding was directed at both individual Catholics and...
“In the Name of the most Holy & undivided Trinity.” A Thus begins the Treaty of Paris (1783) by which Great Britain formally conceded the existence of the independent United States of America. This matter-of-fact invocation of the Triune God of Christianity stands in sharp contrast to the stirring tributes to human authority in the...
Writing to Timothy, his younger brother in the faith, the Apostle Paul listed a number of attributes desirable in a bishop. His final admonition is this: “Moreover, he must have a good report of them which are without [outside]: lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil” (I Timothy 3:7). In the...
In the year before the 1994 election, Ralph Reed announced that the Christian Coalition would broaden its focus. It would go beyond traditional social issues like abortion and school prayer and include economics. He made the case that the security of the American family, a central concern of any Christian political organization, is affected by...
Certainly no confusion of the ethnic with the religious presents more anomalies than the mixture of ethnic Jewishness and religious Judaism that American Jews have concocted for themselves. But the brew is fresh, not vintaged. For nearly the entire history of the Jews, to be a Jew meant to practice the religion set forth in...
In the closing years of the 19th century, Indians throughout the American West began to dance. Dervish-like, they danced for hours and days on end, in the belief that their ecstasy would call forth the gods, bring back the dead, and banish the conquering Europeans from North America. A Paiute elder named Captain Dick explained...
If Franklin Pierce is remembered at all today it is as an inept, do-nothing President whose only accomplishment was to sign the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Historians generally cite this bill, along with the 1857 Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, as evidence of the aggressive designs of the South to extend slavery...
If anything could make the modern presidency look good, it is the modern Congress. Intended by the Framers, through a misinterpretation of the British constitution, to offer a check to the executive branch, the federal legislature has in fact evolved into merely its partner and more often its lackey. The President now openly intervenes in...
The presidency must be destroyed. It is the primary evil we face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us am harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank...
As a Columbia University undergraduate in 1956, I resided in Hartley Hall, a stately building on the Morningside campus. During my orientation week I was introduced to my floor counselor who said in an unambiguous way that hijinks would not be permitted on his watch. He highlighted one rule which could never be disobeyed: women...
I ask my readers not to be shocked by the title of this essay. “To Hell With Culture” was the title of my last essay published in Chronicles, in September 1994. Readers of it saw that I was not an enemy of culture; and now I am not an enemy of higher education. I wish...
Classical professors looked forward with a mixture of eagerness and anxiety to the recent $40 million version of the Odyssey on NBC. Would the production reveal Homer, or would the Hollywoodification of his poem so distort the plot that we would be spending the remainder of our careers disabusing students and others of false impressions?...
For this very welcome and unexpected award, I thank The Ingersoll Foundation and all concerned. When I was in high school, there were certain books that I carried around in order to impress people with my literariness. One was the Collected Poems of Hart Crane, whom I didn’t altogether understand, but whose words made me...
Being a lifelong elitist myself, I have long had a sneaking sympathy for a Trollope character, Sir Timothy Beeswax. In The Dune’s Children (1880), Beeswax is a dignified old politician who lives not for power but, quite unashamedly, for the trappings of office. Parliament, he believed, was a club so eligible that any Englishman would...
“His sympathies were for race—too lofty to descend to persons,” a wit once said of the abolitionist Senator Sumner. For how else could a man countenance the slaughter of his countrymen, not only rebel Southerners but noble Robert Gould Shaw and Berkshires boys, too? The most dangerous people—the ones who will kill you for your...
In 1777, upon the execution of the preacher Dr. William Dodd, Samuel Johnson produced one of his most memorable aphorisms: “Depend upon it. Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Six years later, he deplored the abolition of public executions at Tyburn, echoing St....
For evidence that academics miss the obvious, look no further than the 1996 study by two Midwestern psychologists on the proclivity of white Southern males to resort to violence when their honor is challenged. What a surprise! Psychologists Richard Nisbett (University of Michigan) and Dov Cohen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) conducted a series of...
On April 10 of last year, the European Patent Office quietly awarded a patent to Michigan State University (MSU) for “euthanasia solutions which use the anesthetic gammahydroxy-butramide (embutramide) as a basis for formulating the composition.” On the surface, the event was not out of the ordinary. In the abstract of the public document, the new...
She is the most powerful, the most revered, and the most reviled woman in Australia today. Before February 1996, almost no one even in her home state of Queensland had heard of her. Before September 1996, she was still largely unknown outside the depressing tribe of psephologists. Now she sends Indonesian and Thai bigwigs, however...
Charles de Gaulle, on the subject of Algeria: “Pinay, the facts may prove me wrong, but History will prove me right.” Finance Minister Anoine Pinay: “But, Monsieur le Président, I thought History was written with facts.” Since for the vast majority of human beings historic myth, as André Malraux believed, is infinitely more appealing than...
The regime we live under—the regime of the United States Constitution—began with a set of clear understandings. One was that the federal government was to be the servant of the people. It was to be confined to the specific powers the people “delegated” to it, pursuant to the general welfare and common defense of the...
Every once in a great while, an article appears in a mainstream publication that lets the eat out of the bag, by spelling out ideas that have long been dominant in public life but are usually seen only in vague or implicit form. One such appeared in the July/August 1996 edition of Foreign Affairs. Entitled...
Our government is capable of swift and efficient action when it decides that the regime in a foreign country has outlived its usefulness, or has become a “threat” to what passes for national security inside the Beltway. Grenada, Panama, and Haiti all come to mind, but the methods deployed in this geographic area tend to...
They live in the town, but they have no control over it. For three years, their lives have been at the mercy of shadowy aliens who have slowly destroyed the community, forcing its citizens to work for their enrichment. Parents fear that their children will be taken from them. Some wish to resist, but they...
To register the obituary long after the fact: science fiction is dead. Aficionados of the genre who acquired their taste for it in the 1950’s and 60’s probably already know this. What they might not know is that the death of science fiction has significance for the state of American culture in 1997. With the...
When everyone “hastens through by-paths to private profit,” Samuel Johnson remarked confidently in 1756, “no great change can suddenly be made.” So the market can be conservative in its effects. The notion is startling, especially from the pen of an 18th-century Tory, and it hardly matters for the moment whether the market Johnson had in...
In January 1996, Norman Podhoretz delivered a self-congratulatory eulogy for neoconservatism in a lecture before the American Enterprise Institute. In addition to giving himself and his cohorts credit for the recent successes of the American right, Podhoretz boasted that “thanks to the influence of neoconservatism on the conservative movement in general, the philistine indifference to...
Like a cold front, you could feel the defeat coming; and you did not need Dan Rather or George Gallup to prepare you. You knew it in your bones as you listened to the sound bites on the evening news: Clinton saying nothing and saying it well; Dole saying nothing and saying it poorly. It...
As the Republican primaries drew to a finish last spring, the several pundits whom the Grand Old Party carries in its pockets began to sing the praises of the man who was emerging as the winner. Partisans of his rivals—Steve Forbes, Lamar Alexander, Phil Gramm, and others—started lining up to kiss hands and bend knees...
In Campus, a newsletter of the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a letter last spring from a student subscriber questioned comments about Martin Luther King found in the preceding issue’s feature essay, “A Rage for Merit.” This article portrayed King as a passionate critic of affirmative action, and this, according to the student, does not square...
“It’s a small, small world,” or so chirp the marionettes of Michael Eisner’s Disney, the outfit that brought you NHL hockey in Orange County and a free Pocahontas glass with the purchase of a Happy Meal at the McDonald’s in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. In fact it is not a small world, at least for those...
Thank you for this honor, and for this very handsome prize. It means all the more because I am privileged to share it with Richard Wilbur. [Editor’s note: Richard Wilbur was the 1996 recipient of The Ingersoll Foundation’s T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing.] I have long admired the art and craft and wisdom of...
“There was a time when it was hip to write about Route 66; I was writing about a suburban street in London. I didn’t envisage my music ever being heard anywhere else.” —Ray Davies It begins, as most rock songs do, with a riff. There is an organ in the background, and a rapidly strumming...
Atlanta, the self-styled “capital of the New South” and the host of the annual debauchery known as “Freaknik,” was a natural to host the 1996 Olympics. The quadrennial event has become a giant block party to celebrate the smiley-face aspects of the New World Order: universal brotherhood, multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance. But amidst the revelry...
People in other cities, said an Army spokesman, don’t get their feathers ruffled during midnight helicopter invasions. What is it about Pittsburghers that caused them to pour into the streets in their underwear during recent treetop antiterrorist maneuvers? Nine Army helicopters swooped into Pittsburgh one midnight in June, complete with the sounds of mock gunfire...