The 1996 Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C., in March may be remembered for shock-jock Don Imus’s tasteless diatribe, but the real discord occurred behind the scenes. Interviews I conducted with top news players at the dinner revealed a media sharply polarized. Network news titans clashed over the present state of the media....
10957 search results for: Post-Human Future
Post
My Old Man
“Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.” God knows, Tammy Wynette had hard times to complain of, but if being a woman is difficult at the end of the millennium, becoming a man has always been hard. Increasingly, as I look at males of my own age, to say nothing of “guys” in their teens...
Post
America in Spanish?
American Airlines flies you down to San Jose daily, all announcements in English. Indeed, almost everyone in the Costa Rican capital seems able to speak excellent English, prompting the irony of local kids all studying the language hard, to be impeded from practicing it should they reach compulsorily bilingual schools in America. As a matter...
Post
Ugly Lessons from Katrina
What are Americans thinking these days? So many seem surprised by what is happening in New Orleans. How could they be? Last year, when hurricanes raked the Gulf Coast, a rural store offered free ice and water and a serious riot erupted in the parking lot where people refused to wait in line. Or take...
Post
News From Nowhere
Talking recently to a Polish friend who has lived in both Canada and the United States, trying to explain the vitality of my countrymen to him, I said finally, “Unless you’re an American, you don’t know what being alive is!” To which he gloomily replied, “And no one knows what death is till he moves...
Post
The State of the Art
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...
Post
Betraying His Country
Convicted traitor Clayton Lonetree wept as he described his upbringing on an Indian reservation orphanage and with his father, a brutal alcoholic. The Marine Corps was, he said, a way out of his misery, although his principal reasons for joining were patriotic. The military jury, unmoved by his arguments and those of his celebrity lawyer...
Post
The Return of Ethnic Nationalism
In Africa last week, President Bush deplored the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, defended his refusal to send U.S. troops to Darfur and decried the ethnic slaughter in Kenya. Following a fraudulent election, the Kikyu, the dominant tribe in Kenya, have been subjected to merciless ...
Post
It’s Sovereignty, Stupid!
On March 18, President Bill Clinton tested the waters on the foreign trade issue. These waters had been heated up by Republican contender Patrick Buchanan’s attacks on “unfair trade deals,” which had hurt Americans for the benefit of transnational corporations. Speaking in New Orleans, Clinton defended his “free trade” policies, quoting John F. Kennedy and...
Post
Make arms, not war
Some years ago a friend of mine in Venice, whose family had been too influential during the Fascist years for anyone to doubt the source, told me a funny story about Vittorio Cini, an intimate of Mussolini’s. I recently found it corroborated in a memoir by Federico Zeri, the great historian of the Italian Renaissance...
Post
Did You Hear the One About Syria?
From the top of the mountain that overlooks my Swiss chalet I can almost see Lake Geneva on a clear day, but thankfully, what I cannot see are the armies of so-called diplomats, flunkies, arms dealers, professional wallet lifters, con men, thieves, and men who have obviously been conceived by apes with a dose of...
Post
The Politics of Acid Rain in Canada
Until this year, acid rain was rarely front-page material in Canada, though a Parliamentary Special Committee on Acid Rain did solid work both on identifying the sources and proposing remedies. As a newsmaker, however, it was overshadowed by such Canadian staples as the whopping national debt, constitutional wrangles between Ottawa and the provinces, and Quebec’s...
Post
Whose Atrocities?
The Last Samurai is the latest movie to treat us to the spectacle of the U.S. Army slaughtering American Indian women and children. Playing a disillusioned captain, Tom Cruise suffers from nightmares for his role in the dastardly deed. He finds honor and redemption as a Great White Samurai in Japan. Many movie reviewers have...
Post
Remembering Grover Cleveland
Grover Cleveland, in all of his offices, from the first day to the last, steadfastly followed the principles of Jeffersonian conservatism.
Post
The Limits of Russophilia
Despite all the media attention devoted to it, Russia’s incursion into Ukraine poses no threat to the United States. Soviet Russia was a mortal threat to the United States because she embodied a communist ideology with aspirations of global hegemony. The threat died with that ideology, which is why Americans who believe that the goal...
Post
Out of Africa
But for the death and suffering it has caused to thousands of innocents, the Liberian imbroglio would have an almost farcical quality—Graham Greene meets Lehar. On one side, there was the LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy), a ragtag army of heavily armed but poorly trained and undisciplined rebels. They nevertheless have the upper...
Post
Why Jews Aren’t Joining Forces With the American Right
American Jews may be at unease with the growing acceptance of literal jihadis as a loyal Democratic client base, but they are certainly not turning to the right.
Post
What the Editors Are Reading
I’ve at times found the great English writer and apologist G.K. Chesterton wearisome for his seemingly unending parade of paradoxes, some of which strike me as the discovery of paradoxes for paradox’s sake. Yet paradox, as Peter Kreeft notes in his Foreword to ABCs of the Christian Life: The Ultimate Anthology of the Prince of...
Post
The Big Change
Because the movies are a by-product of modern technology, it’s understandable that significant changes in the medium are presumed to be technological. Sound, color, and digital recording are the usual suspects for having caused cataclysmic upheaval. But on the evidence, sound—supposedly a bombshell innovation that littered theaters with films in which neither camera nor actors...
Post
Thunder on the Right
National Reviewhas been the flagship of the conservative movement for almost 30 years. From the very beginning, its editors set the agenda for American conservatism. NR’s peculiar mixture of capitalist anticommunism with the concerns of traditional Catholicism defined the movement. Even before being cursed with the name “fusionism,” it was a potent combination. Where else...
Post
Oblivious
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. ...
Post
If We Cared About “Democracy”
Democracy is under attack, we now hear regularly. While Donald Trump, the GOP, and (if you ask Rachel Maddow) the weather have all been identified of late as “threats” to our democracy, the Great Satan is, of course, Russia, pop. 144,498,215. Vlad Putin directs, or winks and nods at, a Red Army of hackers who,...
Post
Felix Culpa
This sprawling and densely written 400-page study of Southern political thought, from Old Republicans John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke down to Whig social theorists (and humorists) John Glover Baldwin and Johnson Jones Hooper—with wedged-in discussions of such other Southern luminaries as Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, St. George Tucker, William Gilmore Simms, and...
Post
Obama Flim-Flams Congress on Trade Authority
The U.S. Constitution is clear: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations….” But here are the headlines from the DrudgeReport: Extreme secrecy erodes support for Obama’s trade pact… Lawmakers forced to surrender notes… Forbidden from discussing details with public… USA runs more...
Post
A Very Private Person
When Albert Jay Nock died in 1945, American civilization had known saner times. Having just conquered the world through the Final Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the new colossus had a growing appetite, undaunted-by expanse or expense. It was something on the order of: Today the earth, tomorrow the universe! The author of Our Enemy,...
Post
Elena Chudinova: Telling the Truth
In the autumn of 2005, I moved to New York City, breaking out of the green confines of bucolic and insufferably boring upstate New York to continue college. I wandered into one of the numerous Russian bookstores on Brighton Beach—a noisy, dirty, and delicious corner of the Soviet Union, preserved on the southernmost tip of...
Post
What Matters?
The November 2011 issue of Chronicles has a major problem on page five. In “Aborted Economy” (American Proscenium), John C. Seiler, Jr., writes, and the editors boldly highlight in a pull-quote, a statement about “the 1973 class of ‘fetal matter,’ as the pro-aborts call them.” I have reread the article several times looking for support...
Post
The Neocons’ Palin Project
Will the neocons who tutored George W. Bush in the ideology he pursued to the ruin of his presidency do the same for Sarah Palin? Should they succeed, they will destroy her. Yet, they are moving even now to capture this princess of the right and hope of the party. In St. Paul, Palin was...
Post
Is Trump the Peace Candidate?
With Democrats howling that Vladimir Putin hacked into and leaked those 19,000 DNC emails to help Trump, the Donald had a brainstorm: Maybe the Russians can retrieve Hillary Clinton’s lost emails. Not funny, and close to “treasonous,” came the shocked cry. Trump then told the New York Times that a Russian incursion into Estonia need...
Post
Defending Civilization
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...
Post
A Nation of Davids
” . . . 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...
Post
The Strange Death of the Yellow Dog
Perusing the conservative press in the days after the Republican victories in the November 2002 elections was like watching the triumph scenes in various sword-and-sandal movies of the 1950’s and 60’s, with the reader almost expecting to see outgoing Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle dragged in chains through the streets of Washington. The Stupid Party...
Post
The Strongmen Straw Man
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum Doubleday 224 pp., $25.00 Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat W. W. Norton & Company 384 pp., $28.95 For some among the chattering classes, the electoral defeat of Donald Trump in November must have been a mixed blessing, though they doubtless could...
Post
Jefferson’s Cousin
From the June 2002 issue of Chronicles. There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work...
Post
The Cowardly American Corporation
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.
Post
Disappointing Tone
When network news magnates from Manhattan send their cameras to cover small towns in the Midwest, what happens? Well, when CBS News came to my hometown of Viroqua, Wisconsin, the result was a grain of truth wrapped in an inch-thick sour ball of negative hype. When it comes to the Great Fly-Over between New York...
Post
Moral Impressionism
Vanilla Sky Produced by Cruise-Wagner Productions Directed by Cameron Crowe Screenplay by Cameron Crowe, based on Abre Los Ojos Released by Dreamworks and Paramount Pictures In Vanilla Sky, director Cameron Crowe and producer/actor Tom Cruise have created an American version of Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar’s 1997 feature, Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes). I have...
Post
Grand Designs
This piece first appeared in the December 1985 issue of Chronicles. “Liberty, the daughter of oppression, after having brought forth several fair children, as Riches, Arts, Learning, Trade, and many others, was at last delivered of her youngest daughter, called FACTION.” —Jonathan Swift There are many things wrong with this book, beginning with its title. The...
Post
Yes We Can!
The word transformational surfaced often in the 2008 election season, and for once, the cliché might have had some validity. America assuredly is entering an era of transformation, even of revolutionary change, but on nothing like the lines that many expect. The political right stands to benefit enormously, provided its adherents understand the dramatically altered...
Post
The Horror!
At four-thirty in the afternoon Papa’s on North Mesa Street in El Paso was preparing to open for business. Although the place looks like a student hangout and is located near the university, the clientele is largely well-to-do professional men who can easily afford the nine, twelve, and twenty-dollar cigars displayed in a wide tall...
Post
The Heart’s Geography
I took out the atlas the other day to figure out the routes of the voyagers retraced by Jean Raspail on his first trip to the United States. In the event, it proved impossible to plot a French expedition on a modern map of the United States. Maps are political abstractions. They encourage us to...
Post
On Paleoconservatism
Although I agree with most of the ideas expressed in your round table “What Is Paleoconservatism?” (Views, January), I believe it is a serious mistake to call this persuasion by such a name. The liberals must love you for so hobbling yourselves. To the average person, the name brings one of two things to mind:...
Post
“Go, Pat, Go!”
Pat Buchanan’s October 25 announcement that he would seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party was greeted with contempt by Republican commentators. After all, Buchanan has twice failed to capture the Republican nomination, and in his third time out, he barely registered in the polls. His moment had passed, they argued, or perhaps he’d...
Post
The Truly Dangerous Snakes
Someone must have put a snake on a fence, because it’s raining for the first time in weeks. Jerry the Barber knows what causes weather changes, and if you are fortunate enough to count yourself among his clientele, he’ll explain it. For example, Jerry knows a woman in Waverly, Alabama, who can break a storm....
Post
Remembering Kingsley Amis
Queen Victoria’s corpse had hardly cooled before modernism in the United Kingdom rebelled against Victorian styles, attitudes, and mores. The ideas of arguably the four most important thinkers of the modern era—Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud—were written during Queen Victoria’s lifetime but only gained influence after her death. So too did the literary high...
Post
Obama at the Rubicon
If the aphorism holds—the guerrilla wins if he does not lose—the Taliban are winning and America is losing the war in Afghanistan. Well into the eighth year of war, the Taliban are more numerous than ever, inflicting more casualties than ever, operating in more provinces than ever and controlling more territory than ever. And their...
Post
Hayduke Lives!
It is difficult sometimes to remember the days before September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush was a decidedly ordinary President whose anemic victory the previous fall had required a month’s worth of recounts and court decisions to confirm. After the terrorist attacks, President Bush’s approval rating soared, and his administration sought and received vast...
Post
Thieves, Not Corporations, Are Responsible for Car Thefts
As the decay of America’s urban centers continues, Milwaukee, Wisconsin has experienced a nearly 200 percent increase in car thefts this year, prompting city council members to take action. But rather than calling for more police officers, or even the left’s preferred curative of social workers, to be hired, Alderman Khalif Rainey and Alderwoman Milele Coggs wrote...
Post
Trusted Most—Men with Guns
Public confidence in Congress has plummeted to the lowest level of any institution since Gallup began asking the question in 1973. One-half of all Americans have little or no confidence in the Congress. Only 11 percent have a
Post
A Turbulent Traditionalist Priest
Faithful Catholics should not comply with the totalitarian demands of the globalists. We should not fear those who can kill the body but not the soul.