Letter From Turkey The city of Istanbul reflects Turkey’s transformation over the past decade. Almost eight years after my previous visit I am greeted by an impressive new international terminal at the Atatürk International Airport—Europe’s seventh busiest—and by the massive office towers and apartment complexes surrounding it. According to ...
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The Gunfighter: Myth or Reality?
The reality of the Old West does not sit well with many in academe, who take pride in thinking they are debunking what they call cherished myths of the American people. I think this is especially the case when talking about gunfighters. There is clearly an impulse to attempt to destroy what most of us...
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High Stakes in the Immigration Battle
The presidency of Donald Trump has made some things many of us suspected for a long time perfectly clear, as a former president used to say. Our enemies no longer hide what their agenda is, and job #1 on that agenda is replacing what Archie Bunker used to call “regular Americans” with foreigners. Thus, the...
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Battling COVID: A Personal Score
After three weeks’ absence I am back with a piece untypical of my standard work: an attempt to reconstruct my battle with The Virus and the resulting double pneumonia. I took the first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine upon returning to Belgrade following a three month absence. Booking it online at 48 hours’ notice was easy, and I chose the...
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America the Redeemer
Jesus’ words to his followers about the city on a hill, coming between references to salt without savor and the futility of hiding a light under a bushel, are admonitory, not congratulatory. Those upon whom the light has been bestowed are not to regard themselves as elevated, nor are they instructed to build a city. ...
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The Alphaville Dictionary III
Ponzio’s iconic diner (in South Jersey) is turning 50; designer Milton Glaser is creating an iconic environmental logo for his line of eye ware; steel and Domino’s sugar are iconic industries; Smokey Bear is an iconic symbol of wildfire prevention; and Roberts Shoe store—an iconic Chicago institution—is closing its doors. These are just a few...
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On the Sullivan Translation of David, Part II
This is the second part of a speech on poet Alan Sullivan that Timothy Murphy has delivered to Catholic and Protestant congregations on the High Plains. (The first part appeared in the October issue.) Mr. Sullivan, a frequent contributor to Chronicles, died on July 9, right after finishing his last work of translating David into...
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On The Hundredth Meridian
I’ve just completed one of Chilton Williamson’s columns and I’m literally embarrassed. I now understand what it is that he has been trying to express these last few months in his work. Everything he wrote about his elk hunting trip is absolutely perfect, and yet it sounds so anachronistic! This is what is so embarrassing....
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Shifting Ground
Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Boston University, has produced a beautifully written work. His book is intended to refute every objection to the more or less universally accepted doctrine of evolution, to discredit its opponents, and to assert the compatibility of strict evolutionary doctrine with religion. Ever since Darwin—and especially since the rise...
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Tom Landess, R.I.P.
Chronicles is very sad to report that our friend and longtime contributor Tom Landess has passed away of a sudden illness. A true man of letters, Dr. Landess wrote (and ghostwrote) hundreds of books and articles, as well as poetry. He was a student and friend of many of the Twelve Southerners and a brilliant...
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What’s Really Eating Obama/Wright?
[The discomfort of light skin.] Barack Obama has said that his mixed-race heritage would serve to make him a uniter. But the violently militant roots of Obama's church of 20 years, which advocate “the destruction of the ...
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Be Fair to the Liberals
After some years of ecclesiastical combat (Episcopal battlefield), I think I know why so many conservative Christians do not respond to liberalism as strongly as one would expect. They think that liberals are just cheating: that they know the rules, but like spoiled and willful children have decided to play by rules they like better....
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The Reluctant Candidate
As a conservative undergraduate student during the early 1960’s, I spent many a long night engaged in animated political argument with a close friend whose supercharged IQ was exceeded only by his condescending manner. The fellow never tired of reminding me that, yes, there were a few responsible Republican public officials. He would always tick...
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Can American Legal Education Be Fixed?
Something has gone radically awry with legal education and maybe even legal practice. For about a decade now, the loudest wailing over the state of affairs has come from Chief Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who wrote a landmark article in the Michigan Law Review...
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Toughs, Softs, and Jewish Masculinity
Jewish stereotyping is an activity in which Jews and their enemies have both engaged. Among the self-images that Jews have popularized is that of the bookish Jewish male. The medieval biblical commentator Rashi depicts the patriarch Jacob as a scholar and homebody, “in the tradition of Shem and Eber,” Jacob’s two Semitic ancestors to whom...
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Resourcemammal Eroticism
Readers who have been attentive to the slashing edge of the Postmodernist Project will be aware of Lagado University’s vanguard role at the Modern Language Association’s 1995 meeting. On that occasion a session conducted entirely by the LU English Department’s faculty, “Intersections of Sex and Animal Husbandry: The Love that Dare not Low its Name,”...
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Books in Brief
Digital Is Destroying Everything, by Andrew V. Edwards (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 232 pp., $34.00). Edwards, a digital-marketing executive, states at the beginning of this book that it was not his intention to write “a rant against all things digital.” Nevertheless, his evaluation of what the digital revolution has wrought comes closer to an...
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Empty Gestures
Sin City Produced by Dimension Films Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller Written by Frank Miller Distributed by Dimension Films and Miramax Films So you have been wondering what happened to Frodo, a.k.a. Elijah Wood, after he drifted off into that glorious sunset at the end of The Return of the King? It seems...
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Israel First, Again
Most Americans agree that the greatest problem America faces right now is a faltering economy. One would never know that by looking at NRO’s Corner from 4:54 pm to 6:21 pm on Thursday, February 26. A visitor to the Corner at that time would conclude that the greatest threat to the Republic is the appointment...
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Special Again
The British, like everyone else, enjoy feigning horror at President Donald Trump. Deep down, however, we know we need him, and we like him a lot more than we let on. The United Kingdom is in a difficult diplomatic position as it seeks to extricate itself from the European Union, and the transatlantic alliance with...
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Time to ‘Plant’ Obama’s Health Care
It’s moments like this one—our Health Care Moment, we could call it—that make numerous friends of democracy and good government want to pull the covers over their heads and leave a wake-up call for next month. The health care charade has gone on for a year. Polls suggest most Americans don’t want the measures now...
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Mike Pence’s Rank Hypocrisy
On July 26 Vice President Michael (“Mike”) Pence addressed the first “Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom” in Washington D.C. Pence opened his remarks by asserting that “religious freedom is a top priority of this administration,” that this “most fundamental of freedoms . . . is in the interest of the peace and security of the...
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The McQuearing of America
Yes, yes, curse the defensive genius and pedophile* Jerry Sandusky (author of Touched) and Coach Joe Pa (who continued to employ him). But what about the grad assistant who happened to lock eyes with ol’ Sandusky when the latter was sodomizing a ten-year-old boy in the Happy Valley showers of Penn State? According to the grand jury report,...
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The Wonderful World of Porn
So you thought writing hard-core pornography was an easy way to earn a living? You remembered your adolescence and those turgid paperbacks in which the vocabulary was strictly four-letter, the plot rambling and forgotten halfway through the book, and the characters’ names changed periodically as though some of the chapters were lifted bodily from other...
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50 Years Ago: The Day Nixon Routed the Establishment
What are the roots of our present disorder, of the hostilities and hatreds that so divide us? When did we become this us vs. them nation? Who started the fire? Many trace the roots of our uncivil social conflict to the 1960s and the Johnson years when LBJ, victorious in a 61% landslide in 1964,...
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American Proscenium (Part 3)
Richard Brautigan was a familiar American type that has been with us since the days of the Yankee peddler: the self-appointed Job who wants to take on the powers that be from his chair behind the cracker barrel, the freshman who writes a history of the world without a bibliography, the guttersnipe journalist who runs...
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A Humble Love
“Not only England, but every Englishman is an island.” —Friedrich von Hardenberg John Betjeman’s evocative and educative television programs and his uniquely readable poetry have left an indelible image in the British public mind—of a jolly, witty, and eccentric man, ambling around Britain’s cities and countryside, pointing out hitherto unnoticed details of hitherto underappreciated buildings...
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The Body’s Vest
Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide. —Andrew Marvell (1621-78), “The Garden” Browsing through the poetry section at Borders, I came upon a sole copy of a new book of poems by Fred Chappell, Shadow Box. I have been an admirer of Chappell’s fiction for years, especially his novel I...
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Cromwell’s Climb to Power
From Ronald Hutton’s excellent book, we get not just history but the realization, in this desiccated age, that men such as Cromwell always emerge during great turmoil, rising as if from sown dragon’s teeth.
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Socialist America Sinking
After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published The People's Pottage. A year later, in 1954, he died. The People's Pottage opens thus:
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Written in Stone: Learning from the National Monument to the Forefathers
Each of us has the power to institute in our lives, our homes, and our communities the principles embedded in the granite of the National Monument to the Forefathers but it will take courage and determination.
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TPP’s 5,544-page Flim-Flam
No wonder the Obama regime kept the Trans-Pacific Partnership secret as long as it could. It’s far worse than even its greatest critics imagined: 5,544 pages of bureaucratese that will help only international lawyers and big companies, while slamming small companies and middle-class workers in America. Here’s a sampling of what you’ll need to know...
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Looking Backward
A man from Mars visiting the United States at the beginning of 1997 might have thought that the country was wobbling on the brink of political crisis. He would have learned that the White House was occupied by a gentleman immersed in so many scandals that even supermarket tabloids could not keep track of them...
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The Right Kind of Spy
In these two recent spy thrillers, William F. Buckley’s CIA-trained alter ego makes his sixth and seventh appearances in a decade to play a winning hand in the high-stakes intrigue surrounding crucial moments in the Cold War. On a secret mission to Cuba (Project Alligator) aimed at exploring with Che Guevara possibilities for easing tensions...
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Remembering Booker T. Washington
When Booker T. Washington delivered his “Atlanta Compromise” speech in 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition, nearly 15 years after the founding of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the effect was galvanizing. Frederick Douglass, until then the most prominent black American leader, had been in his grave only six months. Washington, now ascendant,...
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Happiness in Chernobyl
The lives of the babushkas in Chernobyl are evidence that God exists everywhere, and that while destruction can often reign supreme, creation, however small, affirms our propensity for the good.
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Those Ignorant of History, etc., etc.
President Bush is in Hungary to join the celebrations of the failed 1956 Hungarian Uprising, and this is one Yale graduate on whom the lessons of history are not lost. Bush told the world:
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Americans’ Right to Own Firearms
While it allows many controls, the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees to every responsible, law-abiding adult the right to own firearms. To the political philosophers who influenced our Founding Fathers, arms possession by good people was crucial to a healthy society. Thomas Paine foreshadowed current gun-lobby slogans (e.g., “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws...
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Campaigning for Narcissists
On even-numbered years, particularly the ones coinciding with a presidential midterm, my Deep South home county undergoes the grotesque onslaught of local elections. For a few months in the spring and summer (and also in the fall, although this is tempered somewhat by Alabama being a “Red State,” which usually means the winner of the...
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Child Abuse at Waco
“For the sake of the children” has emerged as one of the most dangerous phrases in American politics. President Clinton has invoked children’s alleged dependence on the federal government not just for his putatively child-oriented programs (such as the misnamed Department of Education), but also for issues that have only a tenuous connection to children,...
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Maya at Half-Past Midnight
Zero Dark Thirty Produced by Columbia and Annapurna Pictures Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Screenplay Mark Boal Distributed by Columbia and Sony Pictures Those who read this column may recall how impressed I was by The Hurt Locker five years ago. As directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal, it still is the...
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How Killing Libyans Became a Moral Imperative
“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” So wrote the poet Byron, who would himself die just days after landing in Greece to join the war for independence from the Turks. But in that time, Americans followed the dictum of Washington, Adams and Jefferson: Stay out of foreign wars. America “goes not abroad...
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Managing Rivalry With China
The United States finds itself at a geostrategic crossroads. The moment is comparable to the period between the dispatch of George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” from Moscow in February 1946 suggesting a new strategy for relations with the USSR, and the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, pledging U.S. political, military, and economic assistance to...
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Suspending Relations
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, with a membership of some two million under the leadership of Archbishop Iakovos, suspended its relations last June with the National Council of Churches. This came as welcomed tidings to all who are serious about authentic belief in Christ. In an explanatory letter to the NCC bosses, the Primate of North...
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The Women’s Movement
After an uninterrupted spell of a winter month or two here in Venice—all footsteps in the evening mist, and quiet conversation about the best way to cook pheasant, and a Neapolitan card game called “seven and a half—what one notices on arriving in London is the way women move. First of all, it’s the speed....
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Nelson Mandela, RIP or RIH?
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum is a good rule to follow, especially when the dead person is a stranger in land one has never visited. I am perfectly happy to believe all the nice things said about Mr. Mandela’s character by his friends, colleagues, and admirers. Nonetheless, it is not clear to me that a...
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Ron Paul Rising
When the Old Gray Lady finally deigned to take notice of Ron Paul’s presidential bid, it was in the form of a long piece in the New York Times Magazine by Christopher Caldwell, a piece that confirmed the definite feeling of déjà vu I get when I note the energy, the enthusiasm, and the surprising...
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More Observations and Lamentations on the Way We Are Now
Are you enjoying your New American Century? You may as well enjoy it. It is all you are getting instead of your “peace dividend.” Justice Ginsberg has recently invoked the laws of some foreign states in justification of her Supreme Court decisions. The Founding Fathers and subsequent generations would have found this impeachable and treasonous. ...
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How Long, O Lord?
Since the Middle Ages, the Balkan region of Kosovo-Metohia has witnessed firsthand the confrontation between Christianity and Islam. Metohia is a Greek word meaning “the Church’s land,” and Orthodox Christians consider Kosovo an outpost of their civilization. Muslims, on the other hand, continue to regard the region as a precious remnant of Islamic penetration into...
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False Redeemers
The Last Castle Produced and distributed by DreamWorks Directed by Rod Lurie Screenplay by David Scarpa Training Day Produced by Outlaw Productions Directed by Antoine Fuqua Screenplay by David Ayer Released by Warner Bros. American film would be poorer without Robert Redford. As an actor and as a director, he has given us some vastly...