In October 1996, during testimony before a congressional committee, FBI Director Louis Freeh spent a good part of his time discussing international organized crime. Freeh, pointing to the FBI’s arrest of one Vyacheslav Ivankov—the reputed “godfather” of the Russian mafia who is now serving a ten-year sentence in a federal pen in New York—emphasized the...
Maybe I should hop a jet to Vegas for a weekend at the dice tables or hang out in Beverly Hills for a while. Maybe I should bang a couple of hookers or sniff some cocaine—you know, something recreational to change my mood. I went in the library again and it didn’t do me any...
“If we elect new school board members or run for the board A ourselves, we can expect improved schools.” This is our national misunderstanding. Nothing in the traditional public school system inherently promotes excellence. Even the free election of school board members—a token nod to democracy—fails to overcome this system’s fatal flaws. As a good...
Supporters of school vouchers are jumping for joy over a Wisconsin Supreme Court verdict, handed down this summer, that permits tax dollars to be used at religious schools. They hope the decision will be the basis of a vast expansion of vouchers (four other states are debating this same question), eventually leading to a federal...
The most telling moment in The Agenda, Bob Woodward’s book on the Clinton presidency, occurs when the President-elect first realizes that Wall Street’s bond markets wield more power than he does as Commander in Chief of the lone remaining superpower. “You mean to tell me,” Bill Clinton screamed at his aides, his face turning red...
It has become obvious that the majority of elected officials and candidates for public office are not qualified for their positions, and often stand in the way of attempts to institute the programs and diversity that are the hallmarks of modem society. Nonetheless, American voters, either because they are ignorant of what must be accomplished...
Whether and when we enter this world is decided not by, but for us. Nor is it up to us to decide when to leave it. Most of us would like to stay longer than we are allowed —but our lifespan is ordained by forces beyond our control. We are quite resigned to this; however,...
Among the many haunting and piteous images from the Inferno of Dante is this one. The travelers, in Canto XIII, enter a pathless wood. Dante, on Virgil’s coaching, snaps a twig from a thorn tree. The tree yelps in pain, and no wonder. The tree is the transmuted personage of a formerly great Florentine, Pier...
Any exploration of American nationalism must begin with the National Question: “Is there such a thing as the American people? And if so, what is it?” Most people do not ask such questions. A Frenchman does not wonder if he is French, nor the Pole if he is Polish, nor—notoriously—the Serb if he is Serbian....
Before his trip to Rome in February, Boris Yeltsin promised everyone who would listen that he would personally invite the Pope to visit Russia. Yeltsin frequently rattled on in front of reporters, like a football player still sprinting after he is out of bounds. For example, he claimed that the youngster Clinton was pushing the...
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Illyria Americana Walt Whitman was a bad poet, but he might have made an excellent American statesman, something like an effeminate Madeleine Albright, who can switch from one basic principle to the next with a duplicity that even the...
In the popular film Wag the Dog, an American President caught molesting a young girl seeks to divert attention away from the sex scandal; a mock “invasion” of Albania is staged, Hollywood-style, complete with faked film footage and bogus carnage, L’affaire Lewinsky debuted the same week, and federal officials—threatening military action against Iraq as news...
Is the foreign policy of the United States her Achilles’ heel and the cause of endless dissatisfaction? Without doubt, if we remember the words of Clausewitz: wars are nothing but the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Yet wars are very costly because they involve not only money but, above all, human lives. Foreign relations...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...