Milk cartons carry expiration dates. But, for obvious reasons, they don’t need them. History books don’t carry expiration dates. But, for less obvious reasons, they do need them. History books expire when archival discoveries supplant earlier narratives or when new interpretive theories emerge. Lucky for historical posterity, decades more will have to pass before Matt...
Politics is like the weather: No matter how blue in the face we talk ourselves, no matter how many virgins we sacrifice to Odin, our leaders do not improve, and the drought continues. The fates who determine the destinies of nations are no more obedient to our words than the little gods of wind and...
The usual suspects are out in force to undermine J. D. Vance as antithetical to Reagan’s realism merely because he repudiates George W. Bush’s disasters.
My mother’s older sister Sadie and her husband Roy spent a lifetime concealing a secret: both had been in earlier marriages that ended in divorce. My aunt wanted no one of the younger generation— not even her children—to know about this source of embarrassment and only told me about her first marriage when I was...
Many of my grandkids love knock-knock jokes, but the younger members of the gang don’t quite grasp the concept. They get the “Knock-Knock” part correct, but the rest of the joke falls pancake flat, as in: “Knock-knock.” “Who’s there?” “Sally.” “Sally who?” “Sally I don’t know who.” In their defense, let me add these kids...
Elon Musk found out the hard way that the foreign policy elite demands total compliance and consensus for its interventionism. His peace proposal drew their ire because they want war.
What do super rich people with multi-million dollar summer homes in the Hamptons and similar enclaves think about today’s troubled, often violent politics? Frank answers are seldom forthcoming given that an impolite answer might invite social ostracism and exclusion from A-list parties. But actions often speak louder than words, and a recent article in AVENUE lets the...
Short reviews of Bartleby & Me by Gay Talese and Southern Poets and Poems, 1606 -1860: The Land They Loved by Clyde N. Wilson.
PERSPECTIVE Doing Death by Thomas Fleming Be not proud. VIEWS Afghanistan: Opium Market to the World by Doug Bandow No end in sight. The Global Pharmacy by Kevin Michael Grace A reason for Americans to love Canada. NEWS Anything That Ails You by B.K. Eakman Women on tranqs in a self-serve society. The Bush Clan at the “Oligarchs’ Ball” by Wayne Allensworth Helping out ...
It was a clarion call to his supporters and a hard slap in the face to his adversaries—the latter being gathered just a few feet behind him as he delivered his Inaugural Address. Donald J. Trump never minces words, and on January 20 he showed that he isn’t about to start, now that he’s President...
Now that Samuel Francis’s two-part installment on his “Rise and Fall” appears complete (April and May 1996), it’s time for the readers of Chronicles to hear the rest of the story. What he did not disclose was the nature of his blatantly white supremacist writings that appeared in a newsletter called American Renaissance. In the...
Except in war-time, Washington matters little to the comfort and safety of responsible Americans. Washington does matter, however, as the major source of impoverishment, harassment, and jeopardy. Our Founding Fathers never intended it to be this way. The last thousand years have been defined by revolutions that freed peoples throughout the civilized world. Yet at...
House of Slammers by Nathan Heard; Macmillan; New York. “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.” So wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in “The Soul and Barbed Wire” about his experience in the Soviet Gulag. Like most inmates in the communist penal system,...
W. Produced by Emperor Motion Pictures Directed by Oliver Stone Screenplay by Stanley Weiser Distributed by Lionsgate Quantum of Solace Produced and distributed by Columbia Pictures Directed by Marc Forster Screenplay by Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis It’s too bad W., Oliver Stone’s satiric biopic of his Yale classmate and our 43rd President, didn’t...
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” sayeth Rahm. Opportunistic and cynical, yes. But also savvy political counsel that transformational presidents have always followed. FDR exploited the Depression to launch his New Deal, bring an end to a Republican hegemony of seven decades and make Democrats the majority party, until Richard Nixon...
“Culture does not exist autonomously,” wrote Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community; “it is set always in the context of social relationships.” The implications of Nisbet’s statement should be obvious, but in the age of “social” media, when we speak of “long-distance relationships” with “friends” we have never met, the obvious too often gets...
In this collection of his occasional papers, David Frum once again demonstrates his worthiness to the harmless persuasion. Having agonized over his uneven prose, I finally concluded that Frum’s intellectual weaknesses are his practical strengths. His writing never offends anyone in the political mainstream, or upon whom his career as a publicist may depend. It...
As the high lunacy of the 1990 budget negotiations showed, America’s federal arrangement has been replaced by a confederation of special interests that have less in common than the former colonies—or even, perhaps, than the states that comprise the United Nations. America resembles more a League of Interests than it does a nation. The solution...
Can’t stand to watch the English language’s losing encounter with the culture of who-cares-anyway? A new book says, get over it, fella. “Too often,” argues Jack Lynch, professor of English at Rutgers University, “the mavens and pundits are talking through their hats. They’re guilty of turning superstition into rules, and often their proclamations are nothing...
Plans to build a skatepark in Brooklyn offer a laudable public works improvement to the city but are still not my style. The freewheeling street surfing possible on a Carver skateboard, however, is as American as it gets.
When Charles Causley’s Collected Poems was published in 1975, reviewers in American magazines generally praised his work but somehow managed to relegate him to the limbo of minor poets. By focusing on his mastery of the ballad, they may have given the impression of a Johnny One-Note who, in his idiosyncratic disregard for the main...
During the 1950s, the twin pillars of worldwide anti-communism were Dwight Eisenhower’s America and the Roman Catholic Church of Pope Pius XII. During the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan and the Polish pope, John Paul II, were the pillars of resistance. When Pope Francis arrives in Washington on Tuesday afternoon,...
Early legislative elections in Israel on April 9 have not changed the country’s political landscape. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been reelected for an unprecedented fourth consecutive term and will soon exceed the late David Ben-Gurion’s record of 13 years and four months in office. His Likud with 35 seats will be supported by several...
Gov. Rick Perry was a star at the Texas “tea parties,” denouncing Washington and mentioning the s-word—secession—in front of enthusiastic crowds. Perry had already made headlines by calling for Texas to reject Washington’s “stimulus” funds and by backing a resolution in the Texas House of Representatives affirming the state’s sovereignty, before he fired up the...
Ashley Madison, the adultery website seemingly named for Honey Boo Boo’s fiercest rival, unwillingly yielded all of her secrets to the prying eyes of a hacker group that calls itself The Impact Team. At midsummer, the Team informed Ashley Madison’s parent company, Avid Life Media, that they would release all of the immoral website’s data—“all...
Irving Bernstein graduated from the University of Rochester in 1937, the same year as the spectacular series of sit-down strikes in the Midwest industrial heartland, the Memorial Day “massacre” at the Republic Steel plant in South Chicago, and the publication of the LaFollette committee’s report on antilabor techniques. His college years saw the emergence of...
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...
James Q. Wilson, the esteemed social scientist, should be loved by liberals: He is deeply concerned with root causes. While the title of his latest work, The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, suggests otherwise, the book is not just another screed about how the 60’s destroyed the family. In fact, Wilson says,...
“Spectacular fiasco for the organizers . . . a damning verdict on globalization that ignores its own consequences” was Le Monde‘s assessment (December 2) of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Dozens of dailies all over the world concurred. But the reporting of this event, its background, and the accompanying protests in the “mainstream”...
One of the important lessons of Victor Davis Hanson’s riveting new book, Carnage and Culture, is that the only civilization or culture that can defeat the West is the West. “In the long history of European military practice,” Hanson writes, “it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a Western army for...
Left-of-center social and economic attitudes are, for Millennial and Generation Z women, the closest thing to not having any politics: They are the path of least resistance—and least reflection.
President Biden has a history of painting himself as heroic in personal encounters where few contemporaries recall him that way.
How Democracies Perish was the subject, as well as the title, of an important book by Jean-Francois Revel. M. Revel is a hardheaded journalist who takes little interest in political theory, but he is a keen observer of the corruption into which the states of the West have fallen. When I had drinks with him...
Roger McGrath’s excellent account of the career of movie actor/naval aviator Wayne Morris (“Hollywood’s Lone Ace,” Sins of Omission, April) is not quite complete, in that Morris’s service to the Navy and the nation did not end with his discharge in 1945. A movie in which he played an important part helped save the important...
What are people for? —Wendell Berry We shouldn’t care a bit who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Who musters a majority on Capitol Hill (it is, after all, merely a “hill”), nor who warms the benches of the Supreme Court. If we concern ourselves with what happens in Washington, we give credence to their fatuous claim...
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...
“Paleoconservatism” is an awkward word, but then what it purports to describe is an awkward thing. The word in the English language that it most resembles is “paleontology”—the scientific study of fossils—and a fossil is precisely what most of the enemies of paleoconservatism accuse it of being. Coined in 1986 or ’87, the word was...
“The opponents (of same-sex marriage) have no case other than ignorance and misconception and prejudice.” So writes Richard Cohen in his celebratory column about Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s role in legalizing gay marriage in New York state. Now, given that no nation in 20 centuries of Christendom legalized homosexual marriage, and, in this century, majorities in...
In an interview with FOX News aired on Sunday, April 10, President Barack Obama said that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the ousting of Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi was the worst mistake of his presidency. He added that intervening in Libya nevertheless had been “the right thing to do.” The second part...
Fame, even mere celebrity, creates a reality of its own. We are often curious about the reality behind the image, and if sometimes we are disappointed, we have to admit also that sometimes we are not. The story that Professor Ramage tells with authority cannot be thought of as disappointing in any way. In that...
Finally home, albeit without luggage, which is stuck either in Rome, Milan, or somewhere in between. But what can one expect from an industry, which sends people to their deaths over a war-torn region in collusion with the EU/State Department hydra. After bouncing around on three different flights to get home from Rome: the bad...
“Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Under the Constitution, these are the offenses for which presidents can be impeached. And to hear our elites, Donald Trump is guilty of them all. Trump’s refusal to challenge Vladimir Putin’s claim at Helsinki—that his GRU boys did not hack Hillary Clinton’s campaign—has been called treason, a...
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald called a press conference on October 28 to announce a five-count indictment against I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff and principal national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. Fitzgerald indicted Libby on one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and two counts of false statements, the charges...
Since September 11, I have spent a great deal of time in interviews with all sorts of media people, who range from the well informed to the abysmally ignorant. One question that occurs with deadly predictability concerns the mindset of the terrorists: Just what kind of warped alien creature could possibly crash a plane into...
When the Extraordinary Synod of the Roman Catholic Church ended (December 1985), thousands of words were written about the event by religious journalists of every variety. More interesting, however, from a rhetorical point of view, was the pre-Synod journalism; it provides an excellent illustration of the not-uncommon attempt of the press to formulate the agenda...
Not long ago, during the glory days of the Gulf War, Stephen J. Solarz, ferret-faced little Democratic congressman from southern Brooklyn, was riding almost as high in the saddle as our Commander-in-Chief. For it was Solarz who played the major role in dragging his often- reluctant liberal colleagues away from their traditional dovish stance into...
Manufacturing jobs continue to disappear in the United States, and the process has accelerated during the recession that started in March 2001. Manufacturing employment declined from 18,116,000 to 17,037,000 between March and December 2001, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The popular media have reported that this recession is the mildest since...
Republican members of Congress and what masquerades as a “conservative” media are outraged that the Obama administration intends to try in federal court Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of Sept. 11, and four alleged co-conspirators. The Republican and right wing ranting that a trial is too good for these people proves what I have...
The surprising arc of Donald Trump’s political comeback is not yet over. His critics should brace for more.
No foreign-policy issue facing the United States is more important than our longterm relationship with China, the most populous nation and the fourth-largest country on Earth. If we think in terms of uninterrupted statehood, China is the oldest nation-state, accustomed to taking the long view in foreign affairs. More significantly, if its present rate of...