The recipients of the 1984 Ingersoll Prizes are Anthony Powell and Russell Kirk The T. S. Eliot prize goes to Mr. Powell and the Richard Weaver prize goes to Dr. Kirk. Anthony Powell The serious novel has undergone a radical transformation in the 20th century. The old narrative forms that had given...
It was beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. The stores were staying open until midnight, and the crowded malls were noisy. But all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. We had just settled down for a long winter’s nap, when there was a clatter on the roof and...
When in Rome, one should first try to see it as a city like any other. Easier written than done when one’s hotel is just behind the Pantheon and in its walls there are plaques commemorating that General San Martin, Bolivar’s fellow liberator, lived there, and that Stendhal worked on his Memoires in one of...
Over two thousand four hundred American sailors, soldiers and airmen were killed in Pearl Harbor 69 years ago today. Had we had an equivalent of WikiLeaks back in 1941, however, the course of history could have been very different. FDR would have found it much more difficult to maneuvre the country into being attacked in...
Everybody knows that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key as he watched the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812. But in 1861 Francis Key Howard wrote about his grandfather, “The flag which he then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over...
Greece is lovely most of the time and irresistible in the late summer, so I am back for a second stint in two months. Mercifully there are fewer tourists around now. There is no line to get into the palace of Knossos and even the ferry to Santorini is half-empty. The intense heat is gone,...
Hard as it is to believe, a claim has oozed out of the leftist brain pan that may be more embarrassingly idiotic than the claim that Islamic fanatics needs jobs and midnight basketball to extinguish the burning desire to chop off heads. Mother Jones, a conveyor belt for crackpot leftist theories, says eating three meals...
Having access to personal correspondence and other private papers is every biographer’s dream, a potential difference between a decent biography and a great biography. In the case of Russell Kirk, the advantage was huge. Kirk maintained a “massive—in some ways, beyond comprehension—correspondence” over the course of a prolific life in letters. For example, Bradley Birzer,...
I recently had a spirited discussion with the British historian James Holland, brother of Tom Holland, also a distinguished man of letters, about FDR, his oil embargo of Japan, and the root causes of World War II. We were in Normandy, inspecting the battle scenes of D-day, with James giving us the kind of briefings...
Four decades before Hillary Clinton coined the term “Deplorables,” Chronicles predicted how the battle lines in the culture war would be drawn.
Of our 20th-century wars World War II stands alone. In a sneak attack early on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, Japanese naval forces bombed Pearl Harbor. As reports were broadcast throughout the day American shock turned to anger. The following day Congress, with but one dissenting vote—pacifist Jeannette Rankin—declared war on Japan. We were a...
Rodric Braithwaite is a former British ambassador to the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s Russia and a specialist in Russian history. Utilizing his extensive personal contacts with Afghan War veterans (known as afgantsy in Russian) and his fluency in the Russian language, Braithwaite has written an account of the Soviets’ involvement in Afghanistan that is detailed,...
Can we still conceive of the revival of pagan sensibility in an age so profoundly saturated by Judeo-Christian monotheism and so ardently adhering to the tenets of liberal democracy? In popular parlance the very word “paganism” may incite some to derision and laughter. Who, after all, wants to be associated with witches and witchcraft, with...
In Huysmans’ Against the Grain (1884), the precious hero Des Esseintes has “the idea of turning dream into reality, of traveling [from France] to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions.” He orders a servant to pack his bags, calls a cab, and stops in...
The woke bullies of American capitalism are not really bullies at all. The current corporate aborti-mania is driven by abject fear and quivering compliance with cultural authoritarianism.
The May 6 general election in England was one of the most eagerly contested in recent history. At stake were 649 parliamentary seats (one vote has been postponed because of the death of a candidate) for which there were almost 4,150 candidates. Also up for grabs were 4,222 local council seats in 164 English local...
Years ago, when a Vanderbilt graduate-school party was careening toward promiscuity, a quiet young woman, an English major, suddenly shocked everyone by saying, “Tell you what let’s do: Let’s all name the books we’ve never read.” Suddenly it was time to go home. In five minutes the room was empty, except for the host and...
There is a popular superstition that defines America as a “Proposition Nation,” created and proclaimed by the obiter dicta about “all men” in the second sentence of the 1776 Declaration that the 13 colonies “are and of right ought to be free and independent States.” Is America a Proposition Nation? No, for the very simple...
In 1954, the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that the state-sponsored segregation of children in public schools was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and thus unconstitutional. The Court reasoned that segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority . . . that may affect their [black children’s]...
A 15-year-old North Carolina high school student spoke more truth to power at a recent school board meeting than many adults can muster. We all need to stand up to the perversion in our schools.
Boerne, Texas, is an unlikely location for a contest over religious freedom, but in 1996 the local Catholic Archbishop decided to sue the city for refusing to allow him to expand a church situated in a zoned historic district. The Archbishop based his case on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which forbids religious persecution and...
Leagues like the NHL have made their moral stances clear—their millionaire star players may not engage in sports gambling, but hockey fans are subjected to over two hours of gambling propaganda during each broadcast.
Back when I was in college, a sociology professor assigned our class Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality for reading and review. In this book, subtitled The Politics of News Media, Parenti, an unabashed Marxist, comes across as a pale imitation of media watchdog Ben Bagdikian. Anyone who owns a media outlet or holds a position of...
When the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s preliminary injunction against President Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from certain countries, it cited Trump’s statements about Islam as its rationale. American Muslims challenging the ban had alleged injury of two types: First, the Muslim plaintiffs felt marginalized by the President’s characterizations; second, they...
Eugene McCarthy, R.I.P. When famous people die, they are usually overpraised in fulsome superlatives, well meant but losing all proportion. I’ve complained about this before, and I try to resist the temptation. I’ll try to resist it today; it won’t be easy but respect for the man himself forbids exaggeration of his virtues. He wouldn’t...
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...
In a recent letter I mentioned the circuitous route my wife and I drove last summer on our way from California back home to North Carolina. The first day it took us past Bakersfield, where I’m told the children and grandchildren of Okies have imposed something resembling Southern culture on a part of California. (I’m...
It is no exaggeration to say that the entire Polish nation was outraged and insulted by President Obama’s clumsy reference in a May 28 speech to “Polish death camps.” Not only did the Poles play no part in setting up and running the Nazi camps where millions of Jews were murdered, but when the killings...
“When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.” —William Hazlitt The treason of the teacher of English: that is the principal subject of Professor Booth’s discourses over two turbulent decades in the academy. Dr. Booth, a temperate rhetorician, does not call this dereliction of duty...
In a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump race—which, the Beltway keening aside, seems the probable outcome of the primaries—what are the odds the GOP can take the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court? If Republicans can unite, not bad, not bad at all. Undeniably, Democrats open with a strong hand. There is that famed...
“He hath made us kings . . . ” —Revelation 1:6 Roman beggars, like Roman gypsies and Roman cats, not to mention Roman prostitutes warming themselves by their little winter chestnut fires, are the bearers of an ancient tradition, peculiar to the City of the Seven Hills, the caput mundi, which even her membership in...
Many Americans would be horrified at the thought of discussing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini as anything but moral and political antipodes: democrat versus dictator, peacemaker versus aggressive bully, good versus bad. Fifty-five years of bipartisan hagiography have placed FDR in the pantheon of American saints, roughly at number two between Abraham Lincoln and...
George W. Bush’s bid for the presidency signals the death knell of the modern conservative movement. The GOP faithful are embracing the Texas governor as the true heir to the mantle of Ronald Reagan, believing that Bush will lead the Republicans out of the political wilderness and back into power. They maintain that Bush’s “compassionate...
From Afghanistan to Somalia, Special Ops Achieves Less with More At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook...
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
A year after the American debut of Jascha Heifetz in 1917, James Huneker wrote an interesting sentence in the New York Times: “Much has been said of Heifetz and his musical gifts compared with great violinists of the time—Ysayë, Kreisler, Elman, Zimbalist, Kubelik, and Maud Powell.” We notice that one of these great violinists is...
It is impossible to judge what is wrong with democracy unless we first understand its changing and constant features. The democratic principle as we now encounter it is both ancient and rudely contemporary. Among the ancient aspects of our contemporary democracy are the spirit of equality and the dangers that result therefrom. Aristotle properly perceived...
Zora Neale Hurston mocked the professional victims and race hustlers of her day and advocated for a positive, noncombative black identity. She was a woman of the right.
To walk along a narrow ridge or cliff path, German-speakers will tell you, you have to be schwindelfrei. The French word vertige exists in English (vertigo), but we would be more likely to say “dizziness.” The German word is for vertige or dizziness der Schwindel, but Schwindel also can mean what it does in English—swindle....
“Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow / For old, unhappy far-off things. And Battles long ago.” Wordsworth, perhaps, was prompted by recollections of an age before warfare meant the mechanized destruction of all in its path. Yet war, to paraphrase an American precursor of Zhukov and Guderian, has...
Many see in Kurt Vonnegut a menace to society. Since the late 1960’s, parents’ groups and school boards in several states have launched drives to keep Slaughterhouse Five and other Vonnegut novels out of libraries and off syllabi. Other observers regard Kurt Vonnegut as a writer of consistent intelligence and integrity—a titan of his age....
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...
Americans who hoped that the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child would be stuffed in a drawer with its predecessor, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, got a jolt in February when Mrs. Clinton announced (at the funeral of UNICEF director James Grant) that the Convention...
In the tumid political underbrush of the summer, there were a number of interesting and even important new sprouts, as Pat Buchanan slowly pushed aside Phil Gramm as the favored candidate of the Republican right and almost all of the rest of the blossoming aspirants to the throne of Reagan and Bush withered in the...
“A nation scattered and peeled, . . . a nation meted out and trodden down.” —Isaiah Like Romans in ancient times, Americans are losing their country to immigration, and few seem to know it. One who does know is Peter Brimelow, himself an immigrant and recently naturalized citizen. In his book Alien Nation, he more...
Jeffrey Meyers, a biographer whose fascination with the literary life is touchingly suggestive of the enthusiasm small boys used to have for the railroading one, is the only person I can think of who would consider it a “privilege” to be led on, toyed with, lied to, and finally betrayed by V.S. Naipaul. Scott Fitzgerald...
Newly painted in huge yellow letters on 16th Street, just north of the White House, is the slogan: “Defund the Police.” That new message sits beside the “Black Lives Matter” slogan, also in huge letters, painted there at the direction of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. She renamed that section of 16th Street “Black Lives Matter...
The United States unemployment rate reached nearly 15 percent in April, with more than 40 million people out of work. Despite signs that the economy is getting ready to reopen after its long battering by the coronavirus, more than 20 million people have lost their jobs due to the virus as of the last week...
On September 24 I embarked on a week-long tour of Tunisia, hoping to learn more on the aftermath of last year’s revolution and the state of political play ahead of the elections, which are due before the year’s end. The findings are surprising. The country looks and feels civilized, roadside trash notwithstanding. It is safe...
Our sixth-grade daughter’s class made the “Hiroshima lanterns” late in May when the North Dakota Peace Coalition came to her parochial school. The kids painted the paper sides of the 8″ x 8″ boats with rainbows and flowers and the word “peace,” and made plans to light the candles and set the boats afloat on...