This volume of short stories seems to me to represent, as a book, two distinct levels of meaning. The first and most insistent of these levels is of course as a diverse gathering of brilliant fictions, each one a self-justifying experience. The variety of voices and subjects is itself refreshing and rewarding; the high standard...
All In The Family, the 1970’s TV series in which Norman Lear sought to convince the world that Middle Americans were ignorant bigots like Archie Bunker, recently had its twentieth anniversary special on CBS. It brought back fond memories. Sure, the show was always—as Archie would have put it—your basic pinko propaganda through and through,...
Up in Oregon a woman was bathing in a river. The transistor radio she had set on the bank played as she swam. She was still swimming when a movement farther along the bank caught her eye. She turned and saw Elvis disappearing into the woods on her side of the river. At the same...
The U.N.-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, turned out to be every bit as odious as its name promised. It furnished an occasion for the talking heads, otherwise-unemployable NGO apparatchiks, and sanctimonious windbags around the globe to do their thing, and—in particular—to agonize over the departure...
In Duncan Oklahoma, two black “teens,” driven by a white teen driver, murdered a complete stranger–an Australian student and baseball player. The only motive given so far is that they were bored. Since the victim was white and at least one of the three a devotee of the racist thug doggerel known as rap, there...
When I first heard that V.S. Naipaul was writing a book about the South, it made me nervous. What would the author of Among the Believers make of Jim and Tammy? Could we look for Louisiana: A Wounded Civilization? Well, I’ve been reading A Turn in the South, just out last winter from Knopf. I’m...
Exactly what Vice Presidents of the United States are supposed to do (and not do) always has been something of a political and constitutional mystery. As little as possible, is the recent election’s hint. But even in more demanding times the sanitized quip attributed to Texas’s John Nance (“Cactus Jack”) Garner, FDR’s first VP, that...
Michael Wu wants to become an American citizen. He is 25 years old and has lived in San Diego with his Taiwanese parents since 1980. He speaks English and Chinese, works packing newspapers for recycling, and attends school. He loves baseball and swimming and wants to join the U.S. Navy. By all accounts he is...
If in political and social terms the diminishing role of the aristocracy in Europe was, in the historian’s view, inevitable, in cultural terms its dissipation was not really felt until the turn of the century. Indeed, the intellectual history of our time is a record of careless exploitation and ruthless expropriation of what had once...
The British National Party (BNP), founded in 1982 by John Tyndall, a former chairman of the National Front, has consistently campaigned to reverse postwar immigration, to withdraw Britain from the European Union, to reintroduce the death penalty for serious crimes, to back Ulster’s Loyalists, to support the family, and to place greater restraints on big...
“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader,” is a remark attributed to a French politician during the turbulent times of 1848. Joe Biden’s Wednesday declaration that President Donald Trump should be impeached is in that tradition. Joe is scrambling to get out in front of the sentiment for impeachment...
From the August 2001 issue of Chronicles. All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I...
Oblivion Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Written and directed by Joseph Kosinski from his graphic novel The Company You Keep Produced by Voltage Pictures Directed by Robert Redford Screenplay by Lem Dobbs from the novel by Neil Gordon Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Oblivion seems to me an experiment in form following function. ...
When John Randolph of Roanoke looked at the America of 1806, into Thomas Jefferson’s second and disastrous term as President, he could have been describing today: “Everything and everybody seem to be jumbled out of place, except a few men steeped in supine indifference, whilst meddling fools and designing knaves are governing the country.” He...
President Biden has a history of painting himself as heroic in personal encounters where few contemporaries recall him that way.
“Say, I guess America is just about the best country that has ever existed in the history of mankind.” I have been hearing this assertion all my life and never fully understood what is intended, unless it is merely one of those ahems that we Americans inject into a conversation when we have nothing to...
There seems to be no end to the deluge of inane and/or deranged commentary on “the North Korean nuclear threat.” On Wednesday Matt Pottinger, the Asia director on President Trump’s National Security Council, said that “they want to use these weapons as an instrument of blackmail to achieve other goals, even including perhaps the coercive reunification...
American diplomats, foreign policy experts, and politicians desperately want to believe that the Soviet leaders are essentially like us and that, fundamentally, they want the same things as we do. The Soviets encourage this kind of thinking with their proposals for disarmament, trade, and detente, and with their laments over the madness of the current...
“Actum est de republica.” —Latin saying The Bourgeois Age is finished, but a principal feature of Victorianism—the fullest and most developed expression of that era—still flourishes. Postmoderns consider themselves a hardheaded and realistic people, yet the average American today is probably as much a sentimentalist as the typical Dickens reader of a century ago. Sentimentality—not...
A Harris presidency would mean that the Orwellian trauma will only be intensified: Doublespeak, gaslighting, the erasure of history, and big lies that amount to the reverse or inverse of the truth.
The Tenth Amendment is alive and well in Ohio. On June 28, right before the state legislature recessed, Representative Michael Wise and Senator Grace Drake introduced into the Ohio General Assembly “House Concurrent Resolution No. 44” with 27 house cosponsors and 3 senate cosponsors. The resolution was referred to the House Committee on Economic Affairs...
” . . . Ahaz . . . did not that which was right in the sight of the Lord . . . he . . . made his son to pass through the fire . . . he sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green...
Sling Blade, the recent hit film that rightly won Billy Bob Thornton an Academy Award, is now out on video. As viewers of the film know, it is a marvelous tragedy of classical simplicity. But what has not been mentioned is that it is also a tale told in the tradition of Southern literature. As...
From the October 1986 issue of Chronicles. “The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage. As one of the...
An interesting sidelight on our current ruling regime is its changed attitude toward Russia. From the time of the Russian Communist takeover until quite recently, American leftist “intellectuals” sympathized with the Russian regime and gave it every benefit of the doubt. During the Cold War leftists pushed for unilateral Western disarmament, beating down those who...
There have been strong empires with weak currencies, but not often and not for long. The Soviet Union, Spain after Philip II, the Ottoman Empire after Suleiman, and an impoverished Britain after Versailles all come to mind. That financially fragile states cannot support ambitious political and military ventures is obvious to common sense and confirmed...
“Enough is enough!” “This can’t go on!” “This has to stop!” These were among the comments that came through the blizzard of commentary after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County. We have heard these words before. Unfortunately, such atrocities are not going to stop. For the ingredients that produce such...
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...
There is only one smell commonly found on earth that is worse than the chemical smell of rotting orange rinds. This, oddly enough, is a woman’s perfume—Chanel ?5. As it recently emerged from World War II archives that Mademoiselle Chanel was, in her spare time, Agent F-7124 of the Abwehr, the Nazis’ military intelligence, I...
Despite much handwringing about British colonial misdeeds in Africa and the Caribbean, the systematic, purposeful extermination of more than a million Irish during the potato famine of the 19th century gets little attention.
For travelers drawn to the cradles of civilization, Bulgaria offers a good alternative to the crowds of Greece. One can revel in the Greek and Roman occupations that followed the Thracians. Moreover, while civilization was having a rough go later on in the western Roman empire, matters were quite different in the eastern Roman Empire,...
As the nation prepares to go to the polls to elect the 45th president of these United States, two flashpoints may determine the outcome. The first is Islamic terrorism. It was almost funny to listen to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio inform us that a bomb set off in the Chelsea district wasn’t...
Democracy: A sacred form of government invented by Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also helped greatly in the invention of democracy. Democratic Elections: When the rulers permit the voters to keep on voting until they get it ...
Field of Blood is one of the best new novels I have read in many a year, a superbly written book by a Russian scholar and analyst who is also a careful artist, a stylist, and a poet in prose and in form who has accomplished what few essayists and nonfiction authors ever succeed at:...
Warren Zimmermann was the last American Ambassador to Yugoslavia (from 1989 to 1992), and his memoir is of historical interest, but not for reasons the author intended. When Warren Zimmermann arrived in Belgrade in 1989, Yugoslavia was still a federation of six republics with a federal cabinet and government. Because of the changes brought about...
Democratic conventions are usually filled with soaring rhetoric disguising the party’s extremism. This year’s trainwreck is what happens when a party has no idea what they are or why they’re here.
Tomislav Sunic’s (“The Gulf Crisis in Europe,” May 1991) proposal of an Islamic conversion for neo-pagan Western Europe as some type of alternative cultural synthesis is an eyebrow raiser. But to state that the Moslem religion’s “record of zeal and intolerance is no worse than that of other monotheistic beliefs” is a denial of the...
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make all my memories come alive Take me away and turn back the years Sing me back home before I die Merle Haggard was a real American. At its best, his music was folk art, Americana poetry, each song capturing a snapshot of his...
American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War by D. G. Hart Cornell University Press 280 pp., $29.95 “What the hell is an encyclical?” is probably the most honest and articulate response ever uttered by a Catholic politician in the United States. It was mouthed by New York’s first Catholic governor, Al...
“Nigger Charley” Tyler rode the range of the Owens Valley in the trans-Sierra country of California during the early 1860’s. He was one of the hired hands of the ranching McGee family, who grazed their beeves in the valley and then drove them north to market at the booming mining camp of Aurora. Paiute Indians,...
The true nature of the New Deal was revealed in one of those brilliant ironies that flash lightning-like in a midnight storm. It happened September 13, 1933, the Nativity of a new secular holiday: NRA Day. An interminable parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue celebrated the National Recovery Administration, which was to set prices, fix...
Monsignor Ronald Knox, when asked to conduct a baptismal service in the English language, replied that the Devil knew Latin, thus supplying a title for this lively, informative, and intelligent book. Many of its chapters have already appeared in periodicals, particularly Chronicles and Academic Questions. But five of them have been made by the addition...
The mainstream media is catching up with Chronicles. On Tuesday, June 17, the Chicago Tribune published a major article exposing Sen. John McCain’s connection with the Reform Institute (RI), a Washington think tank founded in 2001 ostensibly to promote transparency and accountability in government. But behind the scenes, the paper says, the Institute’s practices have...
School decentralization was one of the few practical items on the New Left’s agenda of the 1960’s. It was a genuinely radical idea, since the entire history of public education in the US has been the steady progress of consolidation and centralization. Small districts were merged, time after time, into larger consolidated units, and power...
“Courts of justice cautiously abstain from deciding more than what the immediate point submitted to their consideration requires.” —Mr. Justice Nicholl In what was probably the most laudable achievement of his administration, President George W. Bush placed on the Supreme Court two justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who believe...
There are many critics of the flaws in the U.S. approach to the “War on Terror” and the merits of our interventionist war in Iraq. Much of the criticism predictably comes from liberals, but the most important, in challenging the status quo within a Republican administration, comes from traditional conservatives and libertarians asking why a...
The man many Americans hoped and expected to be a unifier, from the beginning of his presidency until its end, played one race card after another.
Such is the Wickedness of some men, and the stupid Servility of others, that one would almost be inclined to conclude that Communities cannot be free. —Sam Adams Much American public discourse—the larger part—is made up of false impressions and invalid assumptions, what sensible people used to call cant, that are designed to disguise and...
Imperial Washington in the 90’s is the gaudiest political theater since the Emperor Elagabalus went to his reward, and Clinton’s second inauguration was as sophisticated as an Arkansas high school prom, complete with theme—”An American Journey”—and decorations: a mock-up of the President’s Bridge to the 21st Century. The celebration stretched out for a week, with...
Kim Jong-il, the North Korean “Dear Leader” (as well as Secretary-General of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, etc, etc.) is dead at 69. The news that the diminutive leader of the most unpleasant despotism in the world is no longer going to regale us with his...