“Unless you were born here, you will never really be at home in this city.” Amy and I heard those words (or a variation thereof) over and over again in early 1996, as we met new people in our adopted hometown of Rockford, Illinois. We continued to hear them occasionally through the years; the last...
10955 search results for: Post-Human Future
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Trump Should Make an Issue of Hillary’s Warmongering
“The Security of the U.S. & the Peace of the World” by Jim Jatras and Anthony T. Salvia One cannot help but wonder if Hillary Rodham Clinton is smart enough to be President. She evidently learned nothing from her attempt a few weeks ago to play the “woman card” against Donald Trump. He responded by...
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The Big Bore of Arkansas
“‘Jour printer, by trade; do a little in patent medicines; theatre-actor—tragedy, you know; take a turn at mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance; teach singing—geography school for a change; sling a lecture, sometimes—oh, I do lots of things—most anything that comes in handy, so it ain’t work. What’s your lay?’” —The Duke, Huckleberry Finn...
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America’s Forgotten 400th Anniversary
We seem to hear little this year about the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in November 1620. Perhaps the coronavirus is the cause, or maybe the ugly mess and turmoil of our presidential election has overshadowed its remembrance. Or maybe political correctness has claimed another victim. Whatever the case, the 400th anniversary...
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Alienated & Radicalized
In the brief age of Obama, we have had “truthers,” “birthers,” Tea Party activists and town-hall dissenters. Comes now, the “Oath Keepers.” And who might they be? Writes Alan Maimon in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oath Keepers, depending on where one stands, are “either strident defenders of liberty or dangerous peddlers of paranoia.” Formed in...
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A Bright Shining Liar
“To be engaged in opposing wrong affords but a slender guarantee for being right.” —William Ewart Gladstone A quarter century has gone by since David Halberstam, foreign correspondent for The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize that he said should have gone to his friend and mentor in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan. In 1964’s spring...
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Gillette Meets Dick the Butcher
Everyone’s rather angry nowadays. Women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, college students, college professors, Hollywood stars, Democratic politicians—you name them, they’re upset. The Donald seems finally to have united the United States. Everybody hates Trump and, of course, men. Toxic masculinity has replaced the evil Nazis and their goose-step, and Trump the loathsome...
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Never and Always
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” Precious memories, unseen angels Sent from somewhere to my soul How they linger, ever near me, As the sacred past unfolds I...
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A Desirable Transit Point
The Republic of Georgia’s desirability as an oil and natural-gas transit point has made her a pawn in a game that involves Washington, Moscow, Caspian Sea oil, and the fate of Iraq. And this game is, in turn, part of the great game going on in Central Asia. Since September 11, 2001, American policymakers have...
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The Myth of Equality
In 21st century America, institutional racism and sexism remain great twin evils to be eradicated on our long journey to the wonderful world where, at last, all are equal. What are we to make, then, of a profession that rewards workers with fame and fortune, yet discriminates ruthlessly against women; an institution where Hispanics and...
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The Palin Doctrine
On U.S. military intervention in Syria’s civil war, where “both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line ‘Allahu akbar’ … I say let Allah sort it out.” So said Sarah Palin to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. And, as is not infrequently the case, she nailed it....
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Justice Entrapment
When I was very young, I often explored my grandfather’s library, inhaling the musty secrets of tomes not opened for many years. It was on one such visit that I first came upon John Roy Carlson’s Under Cover. Published in 1943, Carlson’s best-selling book—enticingly subtitled My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America—purported to...
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South Africa’s Fortresses of Fear
Leonard Pillay’s 9mm pistol hasn’t left his side since July 9 of last year. “Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” the middle-aged mechanic admitted in an interview. “I haven’t got it on me when I sleep. But I promise you, it’s never far away. Never.” Pillay lives in a small house in Phoenix,...
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It Can’t Happen Here!
Friday, thousands in Moscow, giving Nazi salutes and carrying placards declaring,
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Claude Polin: A Remembrance
My wife and I shall visit Paris again this fall, as we have done for years, but the city will be an empty place for us following the death of our dear friend and my revered colleague, Claude Polin, on July 23. Mercifully, Claude was spared the horrors of modern death in a nursing home...
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Bursting the Wineskin
Novitiate Produced by Maven Pictures Written and directed by Maggie Betts Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Growing up in the 1950’s, I was regaled with many stories about nuns and their punishing ways. Having attended Roman Catholic grammar school through the third grade, I did some regaling myself despite knowing full well that my tales...
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Totalitarian Disease
Viktor Trostnikov, a scientist and philosopher from Moscow, recently paid a visit to Washington, DC. A decade ago he was fired from his job as professor of higher mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Railway Engineering, for participation in the almanac Metropol, and he currently earns a living as a mason. He is the author...
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The Hollywood Ten(nessean)
Fifty years have passed since the orgy of squealing and sanctimony, of perfidy and posturing, that begat the Hollywood blacklist. What a cast of characters paraded before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): at this table, communist screenwriters making $2,000 a week scribbling claptrap and convincing themselves that it was revolution; and at that table,...
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One Man’s Idea Is Another’s . .
Let’s say you have an idea. Any old idea. No matter how big or small, grandiose or simple. You naturally want to share that idea with someone, anyone, maybe no one. Maybe you want to keep it to yourself, fearing negative reaction. Or maybe you think your idea is so good, so great, so broad...
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The New Sexual World Order
The New Sexual World Order is taking shape, thanks to the Peace Gorps, the United Nations, and the U.S. Congress. In late September, Dr. J. Ricker Polsdorfer, the Peace Corps’ director of medical services in Africa, was fired for promoting abstinence as a method of preventing AIDS. Dr. Polsdorfer’s crimes, according to the Peace Corps...
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Of Love’s Compromises
Death is terribly tactful. It comes to a man when he finally realizes that he understands nothing, thus saving his face. Watched back to front, like the videocassette that you know is on fast rewind when you see the hooker paying the client, life is a gradual shedding of obsolescent platitudes, a quiet letting go...
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“Buy American”—or Bye-Bye America
“Buy American”—or Bye-Bye America by Patrick J. Buchanan • February 11, 2009 • Printer-friendly “British jobs for British workers!” thundered Gordon Brown, as he emerged from the shadow of Tony Blair to become prime minister. His populist sloganeering has now come back to bite him. Across Britain, thousands laid down tools in wildcat strikes in...
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Bombs Away
John J. Mearsheimer: Conventional Deterrence; Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY. Paul Bracken: The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces; Yale University Press; New Haven, CT. Two of the major problems facing Western defense and foreign policy are truly Siamese twins: that of deterring nuclear war, and the possibility of a conventional Soviet invasion of Europe. They...
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Honor to Whom Honor
“Render to all what is due them,” writes Saint Paul, “Tax to whom tax is due, custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor” (Romans 13:7, NASB). When a zealous Christian offered to help Mark Twain understand the difficult things in the Bible, Twain said something like this: “It is not...
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The Impeach-Trump Conspiracy
Pressed by Megyn Kelly on his ties to President Trump, an exasperated Vladimir Putin blurted out, “We had no relationship at all. . . . I never met him. . . . Have you all lost your senses over there?” Yes, Vlad, we have. Consider the questions that have convulsed this city since the Trump...
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The Blowback
On September 24 I embarked on a week-long tour of Tunisia, hoping to learn more on the aftermath of last year’s revolution and the state of political play ahead of the elections, which are due before the year’s end. The findings are surprising. The country looks and feels civilized, roadside trash notwithstanding. It is safe...
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The Trump Indictment May Saddle the GOP With a Loser
Trump's rise in the 2024 election polls after his indictment plays into Democrat hands, potentially saddling Republicans with a candidate who cannot win in 2024 because he cannot acknowledge his past mistakes.
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Cross-Cultural Follies
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan Produced by Everyman Pictures Directed by Larry Charles Screenplay by Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, and Dan Mazer Distributed by 20th Century Fox Babel Produced by Anonymous Content and Zeta Film Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu Screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga Distributed...
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Trump in India
President Donald Trump’s first official visit to India produced all the right optics for him and his host, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Tens of thousands of flag-waving Indians lined the streets, and well over 100,000 came to the cricket stadium in Ahmedabad to hear Trump speak. Clips from the Namaste Trump extravaganza—shots of a charismatic...
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Of Demons and Ghosts
The 2022 film Prey is a predictable woke prequel to the 1987 film Predator. A better choice for adventure is the 1935 classic, The Ghost Goes West, starring Robert Donat.
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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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Prodigal Son
“Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” —Oscar Wilde Louis Simpson stands as an easy example of the poet divided, whose best talents and strongest predilections are at odds with one another. He takes Walt Whitman as spiritual father and his relationship with...
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Jihad’s Fifth Column
No one on the planet, by now, has not heard of the violence that greeted Pope Benedict’s references to Emperor Manuel II and his reflections on Islam. Manuel, invariably (and unfairly) described as “obscure” or “forgotten,” lived in one of those interesting ages of the world that teach lessons to those who are not blind...
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At An All-Time High
Voter cynicism and apathy are at an all-time high, and as such we can expect the unexpected come November. Those Middle American Radicals whom Sam Francis has been writing about will either revolt at the polls or sit at home, disgusted. Thus far, during the primary season, someone has been staying home, since turnout has...
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Dubious Allies
“We love our children, but we need food,” says Masih Saddiq, a 50-year-old brickmaker, explaining why none of his 13 children were in school. They range in age from one-and-a-half to 25; all seem destined to spend their entire lives making bricks, as have their parents. The brickyard sits outside central Lahore, Pakistan’s second-most populous...
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Surviving the Next Depression—July 2009
PERSPECTIVE The Good Life by Thomas Fleming VIEWS Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost by Tom Landess Or did they? What
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The Long Sadness
William Ball was just shy of 19 and living in the town of Souris on the prairies of Canada when war erupted in Europe in August 1914. The region was still something of a frontier, devoted to trapping and trading with Indians, and inhabited by hearty, adventurous types, Ball among them. On a bet, he...
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The Executive Branch Is Deliberately Failing Americans
America cannot afford another four years of an open-borders Democrat administration.
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Neo-McCainism: The Highest Stage of Neoconservatism?
It is difficult to imagine, but there was a time when pundits in Washington were tagging John McCain as the ultimate unneoconservative Republican figure whose nationalist yet pragmatic approach to foreign policy was being viewed with suspicion by your average global democratic crusader—not to mention the members of what Pat Buchanan described as Israel’s Amen...
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American Gothic
“Do not the seas and the mountains and the prairies and the plains in some manner and to some extent transform men into their own likeness?” —Cyrenus Cole The America First cause of 1959-41 finds a powerful, if unusual and indirect, affirmation in E. Bradford Burns’ Kinship with the Land: Regionalist...
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Results Are In
The election results are in, and those who are reading this piece have an advantage I do not: They know whether George W. Bush or John Kerry has won. (This issue went to press the day after the election.) Regardless of the outcome, however, we already know a good deal about what the next President...
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Mitregate 2010!
If you're the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, and you're asked to preach at the C of E's Southwark Cathedral, and Archbishop Rowan Williams asks you not to wear your mitre, what do you do? Answer: You carry it defiantly by your side and bring the fire about how ...
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Dis-Integrating America
The Wednesday morning murders of 24-year-old Roanoke TV reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, were a racist atrocity, a hate crime. Were they not white, they would be alive today. Their killer, Vester L. Flanagan II, said as much in his farewell screed. He ordered his murder weapon, he said, two days after...
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Requiem for a Remainer
It is time to ring down the curtain on the troubled rule of Theresa May. May became Prime Minister as the result of a series of flukes, which a scriptwriter would have dismissed as too implausible to work. She was home secretary in the Cameron Government, and cannot have entertained serious hopes beyond retaining her...
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Bashing the Baptists
“Who are these people?” someone asks about evangelicals in the early pages of Redemptorama, a book billed as an exploration of Christ and contemporary culture. Despite years of research and her own Southern Baptist upbringing, the author, Carol Flake, offers only caricatures in response to the question. The book is supposed to help sophisticates bewildered...
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An Observer of Men
This selection from around 65,000 pieces of correspondence, edited by Learned Hand’s granddaughter, a professor emerita of English at the Claremont Graduate School, could not have been better done. Both Hand’s letters and the letters of his correspondents are included; some of the most notable exchanges are with Bernard Berenson, Philip Littell, Walter Lippmann, and...
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A No-Longer-Broken City
It is a strange experience, after an absence of 25 years, to revisit a city with which one was once linked by ties of solidarity. Stranger still was it to discover that Berlin, while it has been extraordinarily transformed in many respects, has remained extraordinarily unchanged in others. Probably in no other European capital today...
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The Condottiere
From the October 1997 issue of Chronicles. We live in an age when biography flourishes, contrary to earlier expectations. The reason for this is the decline of the novel and the rise of popular interest in all kinds of history, and biography belongs within history. The problem is “all kinds”: for appetite may be fed...
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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...