A flyer plugging yet another “excellence book” hit my “in box” recently— another reminder of the infatuation of American business with the “pursuit of excellence.” We passionately love success, just hate second place, and truly disdain failure. The drive to excel provides rewards both psychic and material—no question. But I believe it also harbors a...
10955 search results for: Post-Human Future
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George Garrett Talks
This interview took place on September 18 and 19, 1985, at Garrett’s house in Charlottesville, not far from the University of Virginia. It is a sizable stone house, rented, with most of the available wall space covered with hastily erected brick-and-board bookcases. Not quite settled yet, Garrett and his wife, Susan, joked about how they...
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On ‘Inaugural Addresses’
Gary North in his “Pat Buchanan’s First Inaugural Address” (November 1992) cites a line employed by Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” This line was actually written by Montaigne, who died in 1592. Bacon, Wellington, and Thoreau also noted this poignant line in their...
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Anti-Catholicism and the Times
“Anti-Catholicism,” said writer Peter Viereck, “is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual.” It is “the deepest-held bias in the history of the American people,” said Arthur Schlesinger Sr. If there was any doubt that hatred of and hostility toward the Catholic Church persists, it was removed by the mob that has arisen howling “Resign!” at Pope...
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The Merchants of Death of Sunset Boulevard
Playwright Robert Sherwood, the six-foot-seven weather vane of midcentury liberalism, once complained, “The trouble with me is that I start off with a big message and end with nothing but good entertainment.” That’s no trouble at all, as writer-director Preston Sturges insisted in his wonderful film Sullivan’s Travels (1941), but then Sherwood was unduly modest....
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European Union: R.I.P.?
When communism collapsed in Moscow, Prague and Belgrade at the end of the Cold War, ethnic nationalism surged to the surface in all three nations and tore them apart into 24 countries. Economic nationalism is now resurgent across Europe. And it is hard to see how a transnational institution like the European Union, run...
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Old McDonald’s Farm
Now, when world food supplies are more uncertain than they have been for more than a century, the United States badly needs a national agricultural policy. While Congress and its agricultural committees are putting the finishing touches on another farm bill to replace the one expiring, it is not likely that we’ll get what we...
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A Southern Braveheart
Ride With the Devil Produced by Ted Hope, Robert F. Colesberry, and James Schamu Directed by Aug Lee Screenplay by James Schamus Released by Universal Pictures and Good Machine It can be argued that the War Between the States began not at Fort Sumter but along the Missouri-Kansas border in the mid-1850’s. The passage of...
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Sheep in Sheep’s Clothing
Jeff Snyder’s title essay, originally published in 1993 in the Public Interest, provoked Newsweek columnist George F. Will to rush into print with well-timed second thoughts about his own earlier suggestion that the Second Amendment be repealed. The essay soon became a regulation piece in the well-stocked armories of hundreds of pro-gun websites. Crime is...
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A Jug of Wine, A New Zealand Trout
With Missouri frozen solid for two February weeks in a row, naturally one’s thoughts turn to the Southern Hemisphere. There were some hot spots in our beloved country even this winter—Miz Hillary was testifying before a federal grand jury, the Rose Law Firm was smoking, and Mr. Starr was building a few fires of his...
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Walt Disney Rolls Over in His Grave
Fun for the whole family, the ad for the movie said. (I was relieved to know that it wasn’t zany or lafF-packed, although later I would have settled for that.) Our kids, then eight and 13, deserved a celebration for lasting through the final day of school before Christmas vacation, so, loaded with grotesque candy...
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Memo to Trump: Defy Mueller
If Donald Trump does not wish to collaborate in the destruction of his presidency, he will refuse to be questioned by the FBI, or by a grand jury, or by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his malevolent minions. Should Mueller subpoena him, as he has threatened to do, Trump should ignore the subpoena, and frame...
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The Revolution Is
It is all too easy to get lost in the hurly-burly of contemporary politics, which is mostly about appetite, and miss larger and more fundamental changes that are taking place. Ideas we have long been told were characteristic of the American regime no longer have any place in the body politic. For instance, the...
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The Gift of Limitations
When he was little, Rick Curry was the first of his friends to tie his own laces. That may not seem like such a big deal unless you know that he was born without a right forearm. He was brought up to believe he was completely normal. At six, Rick’s father sent him to an...
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Old Dutch Buggies & New Asian Shrimp Boats
Both Witness and Alamo Bay explore the tensions that arise when dissimilar cultures meet, when people must meet the demands of an alien land. In Witness, a streetwise Philadelphia homicide detective, hardened by a climate of violence and corruption, must hide out among the peaceful Amish of rural Pennsylvania Dutch country. In Alamo Bay, a...
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Holy Among Fools
In his latest novel, Derek Turner, author of Sea Changes and Displacement, takes his readers on a seriocomic journey with a latter-day Holy Fool. Along the way, Turner takes aim at the insanity of political correctness, celebrity culture in the Age of Twitter, and the spiritual wasteland that results from a denial of truth. A...
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Utopia and Dystopia on the Saint Lawrence
A quarter of Canada’s 30 million people live in the province of Quebec. About five million are French Canadians, largely descended from hardy Norman peasants who came here 300 years ago. A quarter of the five million want to secede from Canada. A larger (but indeterminate) proportion favor as much autonomy as possible without risking...
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That Kennedy Legacy
The end of Ted Kennedy’s long sojourn among us, splendidly splashed by the media, opened the renewed discussion of whether it’s time that big government, in the Kennedy mode, came back. The late senator’s eulogists—in politics and the media, not to mention at the funeral—tended to nod their heads enthusiastically. We needed the big ideas...
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Adverpop Rock
Doctors are prohibited from hawking products in television commercials. It’s a question of ethics. So, since the real ones can’t do it, stand-ins are asked to fill the prescription. Marcus Welby was never jumpy—and probably wouldn’t have been even if he had accidentally reversed the electric paddles used to jump-start a heart—so Robert Young became...
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The Ice Storm
This morning, an icy December predawn, about 5:30, Oncor, our utility company, performed a miracle. I’m not sure if anyone actually said, “Let there be light!”; but for a certainty, there was light—and heat—and it was good. After more than 55 hours without electrical power, my wife and I, our three animals, and an array...
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Uncle Joe & the Space Invaders
Now Random House offers a computer program to be used in college-level introductory sociology courses. Social Indicators Game, written by Robert K. Leik, et al., is both a learning drill and a game, but not the arcade variety with joystick controller and sound effects. Insert the diskette in the Apple II disk drive, turn the power...
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Wyatt Earp Turns 165
Wyatt Earp, saloonkeeper, professional gambler, profligate, and alleged procurer of women, was for all his faults a great American hero. Earp was born in Monmouth, Illinois, home of Monmouth College, the alma mater of our friend and colleague, the late James Stockdale. Living in Iowa he was repeatedly in trouble, principally for keeping a...
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Final Thoughts
Catholics and Protestants sometimes remind me of Captain Quint and Chief Brody on board the Orca. While they are at odds with each other, a monstrous thing is circling their beat-up old boat and threatening to swallow them whole, to paraphrase Quint. Pretty soon we mackerel-snappers and our Protestant brethren may very well find ourselves in...
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Teaching History Without Identity Politics
“Our children need to learn more history and civics!” is a regular rallying cry for those who want to see America returned to its moral and common sense roots. That a greater emphasis on history and civics is needed is evident from The Nation’s Report Card, which finds only 24 percent of American high school seniors...
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Letter From England: It’s Chavtastic, Baby!
The British tabloids couldn’t get enough of it. Photos of Prince William wearing multiple large gold chains, a baggy track suit, a baseball cap, and a menacing sneer on his face were splashed across their front pages. To the British, it was immediately clear that the prince was dressed up as a “chav.” Like most...
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Year’s End
The house key on its leather thong had nearly worn through the corner of the mailing envelope in which it had arrived. The gate latch was a loose affair operated by another thong, of a piece with the first, running through a circular hole in one of the upright planks that made the wooden gate....
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Hollywood and the Convent
Biographers do much of their work in the study and the library, but they also get to some out-of-the-way places. I’ve interviewed people in bars, nursing homes, and insane asylums, chased down wealthy informants in country houses and elegant apartments, poor ones in drafty cottages and cluttered flats. Some welcomed me with a hefty drink,...
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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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Caucasian Trap
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s order to attack South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, was a breathtakingly audacious challenge to Russia, to which she was bound to respond forcefully. That response was promptly exploited by the American mainstream media machine and the foreign-policy community in Washington to paint Russia as a rogue power that is not only dangerous...
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Lawrencemania and Anglophobia
“Into hell” read the headline in the tabloid Daily Mirror on February 24, 1999. The Mirror‘s reporter had “walked the streets where racism is a way of life—and death.” He had found “racism seeping from every pore,” and his photographer took shots of neo-Nazi graffiti, such as “Kill all coons at birth.” The “hellish” place...
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Bad Investments Pay Off
Money Monster Directed by Jodie Foster Screenplay by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, Jim Kouf Produced by TriStar Pictures Distributed by Sony Pictures Mustang Directed and written by Deniz Gamze Ergüven Produced by CG Cinema Distributed by Cohen Media Group When I graduated from college with a degree in English literature, it occurred to me I...
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Now They Tell Us
For years, National Review has been relentless in its criticism of conservatives who questioned the benefits of free trade, even though the conservative tradition in America has historically been skeptical of free trade. “Protectionist” was one of the most common epithets the magazine hurled at Pat Buchanan during his runs for the White House. In...
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Is a Bond Crisis Inevitable?
With Christmas shoppers out in force and the stock market surging to a two-year high, talk is spreading that the long-awaited recovery is at hand. Perhaps. But gleaning the news from Europe and Asia as U.S. cities, states and the federal government sink into debt, it is difficult to believe a worldwide financial crisis that...
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Books in Brief
Open Every Door: Mary Mottley-Mme. Marie de Tocqueville, by Sheila Le Sueur, translated by Claudine Martin-Yurth (Mesa, AZ: Dandelion Books, 340 pp., $26.95). Alexis de Tocqueville’s wife was Mary Mottley, an Englishwoman. His biographers have never written more than a couple of sentences about her. This is regrettable because Mary was an extraordinary woman, because...
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The Wrong War
I am nervous about the course I am teaching, this coming fall, about World War II. As I will explain to the class from the outset, there are a few things I do not know about the topic—namely, when the war began, when it ended, where it happened, who were the key protagonists on each...
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State-Sponsored Prayer
For practicing Christians, Judaists, and Muslims, what is at stake in state-sponsored prayer in public schools is whether the particularities that make us what we are make a difference. Constitutional issues aside, there are strong theological arguments against legislating prayer for young people. Specifically, nonsectarian prayer speaks for no one in particular and addresses Whom...
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The Ruby Ridge Saga Continues
The Ruby Ridge saga continues. Five years to the day after 14-year-old Samuel Weaver and United States Marshal William Degan were killed in the initial confrontation at Randy Weaver’s residence, prosecutors in Boundary County, Idaho, indicted Weaver’s friend Kevin Harris on charges of first-degree murder. Weaver’s supporters were rightly outraged, with some claiming that the...
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Democrats Have No Good Option for 2024
Given the alternatives, the Democrats might have to roll the 2024 dice with their stammering, scandal-ridden, palpably weak, cognitively deficient presidential incumbent.
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The Good Times Ain’t Over for Good
My great-grandparents loved music. When I look through old sepia-toned pictures from hog-killing day—here’s one of my great-uncles dangling a fat pig into a 55-gallon caldron of boiling water—I always see a guitar or two in the background. The natural rhythms of life, of the year, were marked by celebrations. There were luxury items to...
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Real Men Missing
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...
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The Buchanan Revolution, Part I
Nothing churns the entrails of the professional democracy priesthood more than the rancid taste of a little real democracy. Since one of the main dishes on the 1992 political menu has been a generous serving of authentic popular rebellion, the sages have spent a good part of the last year lurching for their lavatories. The...
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Two Trails to the Rainbow
It was in the spring of 1925 that a young Easterner named Clyde Kluckhohn, on sabbatical from Princeton to spend a year working on a cattle ranch near Ramah, New Mexico, first learned from a Zuñi Indian of the natural phenomenon called Nonne-zoche Not-se-lid (meaning “Rainbow of Stone”), standing at the very end of the...
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Further on the Way We Are Now
I find that local radio gives me a good view of the state of American consciousness, or unconsciousness. Just today I learned that the government is studying how to help “ailing mortgages.” Defaulters, it seems, have been struck by an unfortunate epidemic. Anyone can get sick, and sick people have to be helped. I also...
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A Third Way?
I went into the 2000 presidential campaign an enthusiastic supporter of Pat Buchanan’s bid for the White House as a third-party candidate. I emerged more convinced than ever that Buchanan would have made an outstanding president but skeptical that a serious right-wing party will be able to emerge, at least in the short run. I knew...
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Taxation for Economic Survival
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...
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Rare as the Proverbial Hen’s Tooth
A utility corporation that requests a DECREASE in rates Local government that REDUCES property taxes Airport screeners searching someone who actually might be a terrorist. Airport screeners not searching blonde, blue-eyed young women. A government program that requests a decrease in funding. A government poverty program that actually helps anyone who deserves help. An honest...
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The Abnormal Nation
Since the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, Germans have debated the question of whether their country can ever be a “normal” one again. A current best-selling book—Finis Germania, by Rolf Peter Sieferle, a former left-wing intellectual who committed suicide before its publication—argues that since 1945 the German people have made scapegoats of...
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The Good, the Bad, and the Grateful in ‘The Wizard of Oz’
This Thanksgiving we’d do well to revisit this American classic. “Don’t lose your goodness!” this film firmly instructs us.
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Why the Muslim Won
London is more pleased with itself than usual at the moment, which is saying something. The city has just elected its first Muslim mayor, and people here are calling it our “Obama moment.” The Great British Multicultural Experiment, which many thought had failed, is alive and well, they said. Sadiq Khan, the new mayor, is...