Cicero wrote De Officiis to his son, Marcus, a student of philosophy who had just finished his first year in Athens. Though Cicero does not state it directly, the work is meant to supplement what, to his mind, Greek philosophy lacked most: good practical sense and the principles of action. He sought to fuse Greek...
Every year at midsummer, the secret rulers of the world meet in solemn conclave down the street from me. In the down-at-the-heels resort town of Monte Rio, on the banks of the Russian River in California’s wine country, is the Bohemian Grove, a 2,700-acre “encampment” that houses the members of the Bohemian Club, founded in...
Memory’s Keep by James Everett Kibler Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co.; 221 pp., $22.00 A first-rate scholar is as rare as, or rarer than, a first-rate creative writer. Believe me, having hung out with professors for 45 years, I know whereof I speak. When a first-rate scholar is also a creative artist of merit, you have...
On my short list of Great Equalizers, I would jot “The Chainsaw,” “The Automobile,” and “The Internet” without hesitation. In a separate category dubbed Great Equalizing Experiences, I would begin with the axiomatic two: “Death” and “Taxes.” My next entry would be century-specific: “Bus Travel.” I’ve experienced bus travel in many places, primarily in countries...
America is special. America has a mission. America is a beacon of liberty. America, God shed His grace on thee. We call it American exceptionalism—the belief that, from among the countries of the world, the United States of America has been uniquely called by God to be X. ...
Everyone to Bernie Sanders’ right gasped in 1994 when radical British historian Eric Hobsbawm argued that Communist regimes who murdered millions “would still have been worth backing” had there been a “chance of a new world being born in great suffering.” The diabolically deranged never connect maniacal theory to deadly results. We can’t psychoanalyze Hobsbawm, who...
There is little question or doubt in the public mind about the value of the homeschool. Homeschooled kids better behaved than children from public schools. homeschooled youngsters seldom become involved in gangs, seldom use drugs to excess, and there are absolutely no reports of a homeschooled teenager committing suicide (contrasted with the several thousand public schooled...
What do you do? The is the question that everyone should have been asking from the first news of Raymond Allen Davis's arrest in Pakistan three weeks ago. Mr. Davis, after shooting and killing two Pakistanis, was put under arrest. The US immediately demanded his release, claiming diplomatic immunity and ...
Recent broadsides from the French government, and most conspicuously from French President Emmanuel Macron, against the American woke Left and U.S. cancel culture drew a mixed reaction from me. Frankly, I find no reason as a European historian to believe that French journalists and academics are any less infected than our own with political correctness....
It was an interesting time. The Second World War had gone on two years longer than the First, with resultant fatigue in England’s industrial north, which gave the Labour government its 1945 landslide. Such is admirably explained in Corelli Barnett’s The Audit of War, which shows how the appeal of the shadow Attlee government, particularly...
There is nothing else like the careening prose of Sir Kingsley Amis. Somehow his syntax, his diction, and his tone have a way of collapsing in sync, so that the reader is left lurching in an air pocket of laughter. I have long thought Amis to be the funniest writer in the English-speaking world, and...
Perfection of the life or perfection of the art? The imperatives of art being what they are, Yeats thought that the writer could not have both. With the completion of Richard R. Lingeman’s two-volume biography of Theodore Dreiser, it seems evident that Dreiser was fated to attain neither. Born in 1871 in Indiana, Dreiser managed...
The Book of Moroni. Replacing the White Man’s Burden with the Multicultural Gender-Neutral Burden. The Lincoln cult. Politicians and journalists guaranteed to have integrity—they tell you so themselves. Deification of “education.” Along with the belief that all students are, or can be, above average. Disguising professional athletes as “students.” The infomercial. (Actually, a commenter on...
What is the meaning of the election of 2004 for the American Hard Right? The question, of course, presupposes that there is such a thing as a “Hard Right” distinct from the Mossad’s Station Pentagon, or the “moral values” evangelicals, or the Girly Boys’ Jamboree. By “Hard Right,” in this context, I mean neither what...
At times I think they have to be doing it on purpose. It’s simply not possible that such density of stupidity exists on such a high level. Take Afghanistan, for example. Like a hellfire and brimstone preacher who cannot prize his eye off the pouting dolly bird in the front row, Obama seems mesmerized by...
When Canada’s federal government committed the country to two official languages, it set the scene for the social revolution that has since been foisted upon the Canadian majority. That was in 1969, when Pierre Trudeau’s Official Languages Act declared English and French to be the official languages of Canada, possessing and enjoying “equality of status...
The government’s digital currency issued through central banks will concentrate financial activity in the hands of the state and stifle the economic freedom of normal Americans.
Times of crisis are not distinguished by respect for rights—although, paradoxically, all revolutions claim to be mounted in the name of rights. During our War of Independence, criticism of the patriot cause was an invitation to a lynching, and Jefferson defined the Tory as “a traitor in thought, if not in deed.” In 1773 George...
Should one read Hervey Allen or Anne Rice? Why should the question be asked at all? Why might a discriminating reader today even think of picking up either Hervey Allen’s massive best-seller of 1933, Anthony Adverse, or The Feast of All Saints (1979) by Anne Rice, a hugely popular contemporary author? (Both are still available...
Presbyterians have a particular reputation. We are a rather staid bunch, more comfortable in the environs of the country club than those of the chicken farm, more atuned to the hoity-toity, less to hoi polloi. We’re called the frozen chosen, more for accuracy’s sake than for endearment. We read old and dusty books about doctrines...
Conservative leadership today lacks strong men of courage who will, using solid first principles, face down the radical left. In other words, conservatism today has been emasculated. There is no better word for it. In a recent interview with Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson described the present Republican leadership: They’re weak. There’s something in...
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...
What poses the greatest threat today to the Old Dominion—mother of Presidents, a state secure and renowned for precious memories and aspirations? No person or foreign power, but a vast impersonal force already despoiling cities and states around the globe, a force that I call “sploge”: unregulated, unchecked growth, fueled by the three G’s—Greed, Glitz,...
“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.” —Somerset Maugham It is just possible that Tom Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, may be more important for extraliterary reasons than for purely literary ones. Of course, there are no purely literary reasons for anything, especially in the form of fiction, perhaps...
Only government thinks it can move the sun across the sky. Like me, you may be suffering from “jet lag” today because of the “lost” hour yesterday when most of the country – excepting only the sensible states of Arizona and Hawaii – switched to Daylight Savings Time. (Excuse me, now it’s spelled “Hawai’i.” We...
The Dark Knight Rises Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Christopher Nolan Written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan Hope Springs Produced by Escape Artists and Mandate Pictures Directed by David Frankel Written by Vanessa Taylor Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Christopher Nolan doesn’t do things by halves. His third Batman movie, The Dark Knight...
“Why go to the Greek islands? Why go to Greece? Why not sit for a few minutes under a sunlamp, nip over to the supermarket for a slab of plasticized feta, and get some sirtaki going on your iPod?” The question is not entirely rhetorical, I said to Andreas. With his wife Evagelia, Andreas Petrakis...
There was a time, within living memory, when the label American was highly respected—perhaps the most respected term of nationality in the world. Probably most Americans have yet to take note, but that is no longer the case. A libertarian writer complains that the Boston bombers are referred to by government and media as Chechens. ...
The severity of the ongoing decline of U.S. manufacturing has placed our prosperity and national security in jeopardy. A principal cause of this crisis is the federal tax code, which currently imposes multiple layers of progressive taxation on U.S. goods. The result, as many economists acknowledge, is crippling: a double taxation of savings for investment...
“The U.S. Can Neither Ignore nor Solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” was the headline of Martin Indyk’s May 14 article in Foreign Affairs. Washington may not be able to end that conflict, he wrote, but must actively manage it. Indyk, a former U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace under President Barack Obama, and who served two separate...
Does the United States Constitution still exist? There is one simple way to answer this question. Read any article or section of the 200-year-old document written to provide the citizens of a free republic with a short and simple guide to what their government can and cannot do and ask whether the language you have...
The reemergence of rape accusations against Bill Cosby have divided this nation of TV-watchers. Most members of Mr. Cosby’s race and a large percentage of his fellow males have responded with a skepticism that is not entirely unjustified. It is all too common for women to “discover” through therapy or introspection that their lives have...
Conventional wisdom has it that the recent parliamentary election in Israel has swayed Israeli politics further to the political right. After all, the balance of power in the 120-member Knesset has shifted quite dramatically. The political bloc that included the centrist Kadima Party and Labor, which dominated the outgoing government in Jerusalem, was reduced from...
The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times, by Brewster Chamberlain, just out from the University Press of Kansas, is one of those books that appears designed to turn a major literary career into a mere cottage industry. Nearly everything and anyone that could be related to Hemingway’s life and work, however distantly,...
Readers of Chronicles know well the name Srdja Trifkovic. Dr. Trifkovic has served for many years as our foreign affairs editor and is an invaluable resource for fresh information and incisive commentary on matters pertaining to Serbia and most recently the crisis in Ukraine. Currently his expertise is finding broader exsposure among some mainstream news...
Conservatives who fixate on Communism misunderstand the dynamic driving today’s left and bringing it to power. They are defending a Maginot Line around which the left has already made an end run.
The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War, by Peter Guardino (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 512 pp., $39.95). This is an excellent account—part social, part military, and part political—of the Mexican-American War, fought between 1846 and 1848 and concluded by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1849 that ceded, essentially, the northern half of...
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 that would not mirror the standard hagiographical...
Benjamin Disraeli and John Henry Cardinal Newman are credited with bringing intriguing imponderables into the syndrome of conservative philosophies. Theirs was, in Russell Kirk’s phrase, “conservatism of imagination,” a rather vague category of cognition and judgment. In fact, Disraeli’s historical image is deceptively coherent, definable, even simple: he’s perceived as an astute statesman, dedicated to...
The invasion of Dodger Stadium may mark the peak of public tolerance for all things LGBTQ+. Reaching this low point was the inevitable result of Americans discarding all guiding principles other than unfettered personal autonomy and absolute equality.
Every school has a playground for its pupils; English schools provide a playground for politicians, too. Children seek security, regularity, and continuity: The games they play in the schoolyard observe rules that do not change. Change, though, is the contemporary politician’s reason for existence: He seeks not to hold fast to that which is good...
In the 1970’s, Mel Bradford and I were teaching at the University of Dallas, which offered a doctoral program in politics and literature. Students took courses in both disciplines. It was a well-designed curriculum and produced some first-rate scholars. Bradford had long been interested in political theory, but the program probably encouraged him to read...
Not since President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock and JFK sent U.S. marshals to the University of Alabama has the federal government seemed so at war with a state of the union. Arkansas and Alabama were defying U.S. court orders to desegregate. But Barack Obama's war on Arizona is ...
“Studying” philanthropy is a new academic enterprise, and one riven by various interests. Though a growing camp of scholars is following grant money, their studies, even when critical, generally confirm the conventional wisdom of foundation leaders. As a permanent supplicant, the academy approaches organized philanthropy with either a tugged forelock or an upraised list. Ellen...
I have always wanted to spend some time in Rome, for a whole rosary of personal reasons. As with much else in a person’s private life, to recount these in print is to expose oneself to public ridicule. Yes, Rome is a wonderful city. Yes, the food is good. But then in England, where I...
In the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the question has been raised whether the U.S.-Saudi alliance can or should be saved. It is based on false premises: there is no such alliance. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is neither a friend nor an ally of America. It...
NAFTA will fail a thousand times before its advocates beg forgiveness. Not that an apology should be accepted, but justice requires, at least, that they admit their complicity in the century’s biggest intergovernmental financial seam. NAFTA led (thanks to the Republican leadership) to a $50 billion American bailout of Mexico, the loss of the dollar’s...
Every definition of masculinity into which our Lord Jesus Christ does not fit belongs in the rubbish heap. Indeed, there could be no greater example of a man than He. Contrary to modern portrayals, Jesus was neither a sensitive metrosexual nor a macho-macho man. The tenderness that He displayed toward those whom He loved (including...
While we await the FBI’s seventh investigation into Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s background, some considerations: All four of Christine Blasey Ford’s witnesses to a party where he allegedly attacked her deny the party ever happened. The first narrative having run its course, the Democratic War Room spun out another dubious claim of sexual assault. The second...