Did you notice last spring how the national media-the New York Times, Newsweek, NPR, all of them-almost simultaneously began talking about “the Bubba vote”? I seriously doubt that many of these folks have actually met Bubba, much less discussed politics with him, but at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Contest they sure could...
10955 search results for: Post-Human Future
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LIBERAL ARTS
Fraud and deception among society’s heroes draw attention to contradictions and inconsistencies in its value systems. Because American culture applauds entrepreneurship, independence, and ambition, for example, scientists have been encouraged to develop independent imaginations and innovative research, to engage in intense competition, to strive for success. Ironically, Americans also want their whitecoated heroes to be...
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Trump Right on Trade Predators
Is America still a serious nation? Consider. While U.S. elites were denouncing Donald Trump as unfit to serve for having compared Miss Universe 1996 to “Miss Piggy” of “The Muppets,” the World Trade Organization was validating the principal plank of his platform. America’s allies are cheating and robbing her blind on trade. According to the...
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Alvin Bragg—Nothing to Brag About
New Yorkers need a DA who watches out for them, not for himself.
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Could Stay-at-Home Moms Help Put Trump Over the Top?
Donald Trump caught a lot of people off guard with his proposal, spearheaded by daughter Ivanka, on child-care benefits. This is not familiar Republican territory. Of course, Hillary Clinton’s plan is more “generous,” promising 12 weeks of paid leave to Trump’s six. But there’s one, big fat difference that has been underreported: Hillary’s plan only...
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Unconscious Beauty
This handsome hardbound volume, an authoritative study in art history that can pass as a coffee-table book, is billed by its publisher as “the first-ever history of the representation of dreams in Western painting.” The author, Daniel Bergez, is himself a painter, and also a scholar, critic, and professor at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris....
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Ethnic Cleansing
Some memories of auld lang syne on New Year's Day 2010. This Rockford Files first appeared in the August 2002 issue of Chronicles. Family traditions often get started by accident—especially, perhaps, those that center on food. On the second New Year’s Eve after we were married, my wife and ...
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Goldman Sachs and the Price of Beer
“I do believe that big money does organize itself somewhat like feral hogs. If they detect a weakness or a bad scent, they’ll go after it,” said Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve, on June 24. Shortly thereafter, we started finding that our banks were engaged in all kinds of nonbank business—aluminum, electricity,...
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Battle of the Journeymen
The 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I has long been anticipated, judging by the publication of dozens of new books on what was called, until World War II, the Great War, although the Ghastly War might be more appropriate. Paul Jankowski, a professor of history at Brandeis University, has made a scholarly...
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GOP Country: A Troubled Marriage
Back in February, music historian J. Lester Feder published an article in the American Prospect entitled “When Country Went Right.” As Feder would have it, country music wasn’t always as “conservative” as it is today. Once upon a time, it seems, country music was a left-leaning, “populist” American art form. Then Richard Nixon, taking his...
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Chickenhawks Roosting
Two facts about George W. Bush now seem incontestable: He has been the neoconservative chief executive par excellence, and he has become a failed president. Bush has led the nation to war in Iraq, branded Iran and North Korea as members of the “Axis of Evil,” and declared in his Second Inaugural Address that America’s...
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Report From Rome: Berlusconi’s Comeback?
Ah, Italian politics . . . This scene reminds me of my native Serbia: corruption, sleaze, scandals, cushy jobs for the boys, and dramatis personæ that changes but little from one decade to another. There’s also the same resentment at various dictates coming from the German-dominated European Union—of which Italy (unlike Serbia) is a member, but...
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American Shakespeare
Shakespeare contains the cultural history of America. From first to last, Shakespeare is the graph of evolving American values. He early made the transatlantic crossing: It is thought that Cotton Mather was the first in America to acquire a First Folio. Richard III was performed in New York in 1750, and in 1752 the governor...
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Annus Felix
The Independent Orders of Zhukov, Lenin, and October Revolution Red Banner Operational Purpose Division of Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia – yes, my friends, there is such a thing – has just been given back its old name. Now it will again be called the Felix Dzerzhinsky Independent Orders of...
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Debt Money and the Federal Debt
In 1985, I was a resident of Rancho Sante Fe, California, and a member of the prestigious Rancho Sante Fe Golf and Country Club. I often played golf with “Jack” (not his real name), who was listed in Forbes magazine as one of the 400 richest people in America. On one occasion, as we were...
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A Day in Sanders’ America
A wake-up call sounds in the Reeducation Camp #3017, on a bitterly cold North Dakotan morning. It is January 2023. Inmate Harold Denison, age 48, designated IPR (incarcerated pending reeducation) on the orders of President Sanders’ Homeland Security Secretary Kyle Jurek (“on the well-founded suspicion of being a Chronicles subscriber”), is feverish and yearns for...
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Anglo-Apologia
Can reviewer Ralph Berry find nothing in the public life of Winston Churchill that was negative, or was there nothing of that nature in Andrew Robert’s new book: Churchill: Walking with Destiny? Was Churchill’s reputed collaboration with Foreign Secretary Edward Gray [sic] to effect a partial mobilization of the Army, prior to Britain’s decision to...
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Government by the People
Héctor Villa was, by nature, a patient, long-suffering man. Even so, he arrived home in a cross mood that evening, at the end of an unusually frustrating day. First, there had been the traffic ticket; next, his unproductive meeting with Mrs. Ahmadinejihad. Finally, he’d been unable to meet with the school principal, after waiting for...
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The Price of Papal Popularity
Normally a synod of Catholic bishops does not provide fireworks rivaling the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley’s boys in blue ran up the score on the radicals in Grant Park. But, on Oct. 13, there emanated from the Synod on the Family in Rome a 12-page report from a committee...
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Will there be an Independence Day 2015?
As Independence Day 2014 approaches, I’m still wondering when one of the Republican presidential candidates is going to seize the immigration issue and march to victory in the White House. That’s assuming there will even be an independent United States in 2015. Or if the country exists, that it will be anything but a totalitarian...
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Return of the Kings
In a television appearance on January 7, President Emmanuel Macron of France, rather than addressing his compatriots exclusively, directed his remarks to his “fellow citizens of the E.U.,” saying, “2018 is a very special year, and I will need you this year.” Macron, a former investment banker and cabinet minister in the Socialist government of...
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Obama Versus the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court’s power has become virtually unchecked: Amending the Constitution to reverse an erroneous Supreme Court decision is nearly impossible, and Congress has proved too timid to use the other weapons the Constitution provides to check the Court, including its power to restrict the jurisdiction of the federal courts. As a result, the Supreme...
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A Book That Needs to Be Read
There are many reasons why one might conclude that the United States is in a spiral of self-destruction and is in fact no longer a Christian country. One of the most obvious—apart from 40-plus years of legalized abortion—is the current effort to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples. But this is just the latest in...
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Hamas is Israel’s Golem
Hamas is a golem, a monstrous creature from Jewish folklore created from mud and made animate, which escaped his master and turned against him.
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Critic’s Choice
Like any civilized society, America reveres its artists. Unfortunately, in this as in most other things, we tend to go overboard. Consequently, we are all too often subjected to the spectacle of a ludicrous buffoon like Gore Vidal on national television pontificating on public policy questions, or a Norman Mailer—a man who once stabbed one...
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Our Triumph in Iraq
Iraq is conquered; unfortunately, winning the peace is proving far more difficult. Bringing down an unpopular, isolated dictatorship in a wreck of a country is one thing. Creating a liberal, multiparty, multiethnic democracy where one has never existed is quite another. Officially, the Pentagon proclaims that we will stay “as long as necessary” and leave...
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Trying Saddam
Robert A. Taft, in a speech delivered at Kenyon College in October 1946, expressed strong opposition to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that were just ending. Taft argued that the defendants, the architects of the Nazi regime who had been found guilty of waging a war of aggression and had been sentenced to death, were...
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The Future of Russia and the West: A Conversation with Elena Chudinova, Part II
[A Continuation of the interview between Srdja and Elena] ST: One worrying aspect is that Russia has allowed almost uncontrollable immigration from former Soviet Central Asia and this may, in view, of the low birth rates of the Orthodox Russians, change the demographic picture of the country in only a few decades. EC: I always...
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The Conservative Strikes Back
The Democrats picked Jim Webb to offer their response to the President’s State of the Union Address for the same reason they anointed him to face Republican Sen. George Allen in the November 2006 election: his opposition to the war in Iraq, which is bolstered by his surpassing valor in Vietnam. The risible aspect of...
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The Bush Economic Agenda
Energized by his election as if it were a landslide, President George W. Bush proposes to spend his “political capital” on an ambitious economic agenda headed by reform of Social Security and the U.S. Tax Code. The President’s candor in acknowledging that the deficits and tax cuts of his first term—the “Wall Street Relief and...
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From High Noon to Django Unchained
Our new issue of Chronicles contains several essays that assess films that can be classified in some sense as “conservative,” or at least dealing with themes of interest to the political right. Several of those who participated in making these movies and whom we discuss in this issue, such as Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, American...
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Steadfast Sessions
President and five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said that a man must “believe in his luck” in order to lead. Jeff Sessions is such a man. He has not only survived multiple setbacks, considered career ending by many, but has consistently come out ahead. Most recently, his early and conspicuously vocal endorsement of Donald Trump...
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George Frost Kennan, R.I.P.
George Frost Kennan died on March 17 in his home—one year and one month and one day after his 100th birthday. I am now 81 years old. He was the greatest American I have known. He was (and remains) A Triumph of Character. His obituaries recorded his many achievements adequately, often with the praise that...
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Three Strikes and You’re Out
April 2005 will mark the third mayoral election since I arrived in Rockford at the end of 1995. In that first election in April 1997, Rockford’s first (and, so far, only) black mayor, Democrat Charles Box, was running for his third term. For eight years, the city had been under a federal court order to...
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The Truth in Plain Sight
After decades of massacres on the school grounds of America, theories advanced to explain them come down to two: the ready availability of guns in this country, and the number of “angry white males” among student bodies (though in the case of the Virginia Tech killer, the perpetrator was Asian). These explanations fit nicely into...
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Is Trump the Heir to Reagan?
Three decades ago, as communications director in the White House, I set up an interview for Bill Rusher of National Review. Among his first questions to President Reagan was to ask him to assess the political importance of Barry Goldwater. Said Reagan, “I guess you could call him the John the Baptist of our movement.”...
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Which Ones are the Enemy?
For Southerners, the hatred of so many of their “fellow Americans” comes so steadily and predictably that it is usually best simply to ignore it and let the heathen rage. We are an easy-going, non-ideological, and Christian people, so most of us don’t even notice. However, the Washington Times has usefully exposed a particularly egregious example, an...
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The Globetrotters: Bush and Gore on Foreign Policy
“It’s the economy, stupid” is once again the slogan of the Democratic presidential campaign, but this time around it is also the Republican slogan. The exclusive focus on domestic issues may reflect a general American contempt for all things foreign, but there is another reason for the lack of debate on foreign policy: There is...
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The Grammys’ Growl
It is encouraging to see that Michael Jackson is still capable of something more than Pepsi commercials. That he didn’t pick up an award is, as many have suggested, a backlash against the success of Thriller. But the correlation is not as direct as it seems. The real problem is that Jackson is not the...
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The Unentitled
“There’s something almost un-American about etiquette. . . . For a lot of Americans the idea that there are rules out there about the proper way to behave, rules more elaborate than just common sense, seems pretentious, European, like one more thing we fought the British to be free of.” —Nancy Updike, This American Life,...
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Mormons and Modernism
“So pale grows Reason at Religion’s sight, So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.” —John Dryden Leonard Arrington: Brigham Young: American Moses; Alfred A. Knopf; New York. Richard L. Bushman: Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL. Jan Shipps: Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL. Ernest...
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It Takes Smarm
Anyone entertaining an unpleasant thought about the Clinton White House is almost certainly a victim of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” which Mrs. Clinton (formerly Ms. Rodham-Clinton) has blamed for her husband’s travails. For many years, the Clintons have used the word “children” as an odd euphemism for “government,” Joycelyn Elders and Marian Wright Edelman being...
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The Justification for War
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
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Less Than Favorable Stories
Civil War reenactments are more popular today than at any time in the 135 years since “the late unpleasantness” came to an end. Recent news stories, however, have been less than favorable to reenactors. In these remarks, delivered to 14,000 spectators of the 1999 Gettysburg reenactment, Ronald F. Maxwell, writer and director of the motion...
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Tucker Carlson’s Firebell
Tucker Carlson shook the punditariat, liberal and conservative alike, with his incisive analysis, delivered during one of his show monologues, of the breakdown of the American family, a genuine four-alarm crisis that cannot be exaggerated. In it, he fingered long-standing economic policies pushed by Swamp residents and their donors for the benefit of a rootless...
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New Online ‘Mating Sites’ Skip the Soulmate
Boomer parents are frustrated by their lack of grandchildren. Meanwhile, millennials complain about the lack of romantic partners. Never fear, technology has provided a solution! No longer must millennials date to find the love of their life, marry, and have children. Now they can shop online to find the perfect person to breed with before...
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The New Bulwark of Christendom
During the centuries of struggle between European Christianity and Islam, various countries were referred to as “Antemurale Christianitatis,” the bulwark of Christendom. Today, with the torrent of mostly Islamic “migrants” heading toward Europe only increasing, that title belongs to Hungary. Hungary was roundly condemned in the international press for seeking to enforce EU rules, which...
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On ‘Illegal Immigration’
Thank you for Theodore Pappas’s article (Cultural Revolutions) on illegal immigration in the January 1991 issue. So little is written about the topic that we are grateful when anyone recognizes the problems. A little clarification. There are two kinds of deportation. Most frequent is what agents refer to as “VRs.” This translates into “voluntary returns,”...
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Sacred Encounters
“Time,” R.H. Ives Gammell wrote in The Twilight of Painting, “is a ruthless appraiser of art and, by and large, a very just one.” Gammell addressed his book “to readers disposed to consider the complete deterioration of the older forms of painting a disaster to civilization.” When he published The Twilight in 1946, Gammell’s purpose...
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Staying on the Ground
Donald Trump’s campaign for the Reform Party presidential nomination may never get off the ground, and anyone who has ever visited Trump’s stomping grounds in Atlantic City should not be surprised. The Trump Taj Mahal casino sits alongside the Atlantic City boardwalk, a gaudy reminder of the excesses of its owner. The “Taj,” which ranked...