They are called the PIGS—Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain. What they have in common is that all are facing deficits and debts that could bring on national defaults and break up the European Union. What brought the PIGS to the edge of the abyss? All are neo-socialist states that provide welfare for poor people, generous unemployment,...
10954 search results for: Post-Human Future
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Hayduke Lives!
It is difficult sometimes to remember the days before September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush was a decidedly ordinary President whose anemic victory the previous fall had required a month’s worth of recounts and court decisions to confirm. After the terrorist attacks, President Bush’s approval rating soared, and his administration sought and received vast...
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Been There, Done That
It is a beautiful April evening in Hico, Texas. My wife and I are having dinner with my in-laws, and I am eyeballing a statue of Billy the Kid across the street from Lilly’s Restaurant. Hico, you see, was the home of “Brushy Bill” Roberts, widely believed around these parts to have been the notorious...
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Turkey and Trannies
I don’t blame you for not being up on the very latest from Broadway, that gayest of entertainment venues. And I’ll admit that I’m not about to enrich your cultural life by bringing you up to speed. Unfortunately, however, this has broader implications. I write of Kinky Boots, the current Tony-winning Broadway smash about a...
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A Great Refusal
As I have previously observed in these pages, each of the ratification conventions with which the people of the 13 original states passed judgment on the handiwork of the Great Convention had its own distinctive drama— structural characteristics which in the end colored the meaning of the Constitution in the communities by which it was...
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A Turbulent Traditionalist Priest
Faithful Catholics should not comply with the totalitarian demands of the globalists. We should not fear those who can kill the body but not the soul.
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Of Women and Wanderlust
Elizabeth Arthur: Beyond the Mountain; Harper & Row; New York. Blanche d’Alpuget: Turtle Beach; Simon &Schuster; New York. Janet Turner Hospital: The Ivory Swing; E. P. Dutton; New York. by Bryce Christensen Home, as Robert Frost observed, is that place “where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But...
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Revolution in the Air
Thanks to a November election upset, Kafka, South Dakota—home of Lagado University—is poised to become the vanguard college town of 21st-century America. Joe Steele, a Lagado University English Department adjunct running as a candidate of the Farmer-Activist- Worker-Grad Student Alliance (a coalition of the Revolutionary Democratic Workers’ Party, the Workers’ Party of Democratic Revolutionaries, the...
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Out on a Limb: America’s Pledge to Defend Taiwan
Washington’s implicit commitment, under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, to defend Taiwan from attack is becoming more perilous by the year. Given Beijing’s increasingly insistent demands that Taiwanese leaders cease their efforts to spurn reunification with the mainland, there is a very real possibility that the United States will someday be called upon to honor...
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Lincoln, the Antiwar Congressman
The only time before his presidency when Abraham Lincoln held national office was a single term (1847-49) in the U.S. House of Representatives. During that time, while debating the Mexican-American War, Lincoln zealously defended the constitutional prerogative of Congress to declare war and enact legislation against a perceived usurpation of ...
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Fighting Abated
The fighting in Dagestan was abating as of late August. Russian firepower had slowed the Chechen-backed Islamic militants, led by an international corps of Islamists, including Chechen “field commander” (read: “warlord”) Shamil Basayevaud the Jordanian professional militant known only as “Khattab.” They had seized 20 towns and villages in the mountainous region of western Dagestan,...
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Winners and Losers From the Ukraine War
America is not the winner in the Ukraine War. Our involvement has not made us safer or in any way strengthened us.
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The Most Odious Form of Abortion
The partial birth abortion of late-term fetuses is the most odious form of abortion, known as “dilatation and extraction” (D & X). The procedure, fully and gruesomely described in the major media and on the floor of Congress earlier this year, when President Clinton vetoed the bill that would have banned D & X, involves...
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Public Restroom Equality Law
The New York State public restroom equality law, popularly being referred to as “the potty parity act,” is no laughing matter. Rather, it takes away gains achieved by men in their long struggle, starting with the establishment of the first public restroom, to receive some degree of compensation for past inequities. The purpose of the...
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Who Spawned the Christchurch Killer?
Last Friday, in Christchurch, New Zealand, one of the more civilized places on earth, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant, an Australian, turned on his cellphone camera and set out to livestream his massacre of as many innocent Muslim worshippers as he could kill. Using a semi-automatic rifle, he murdered more than 40 men, women and children at...
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The New Racism on Campus
Having done four years of graduate work at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, I was distressed to learn that there, as elsewhere, a few radical activists can rout a weak administration and faculty by crying “racism.” Last February a special Task Force on Race Relations released a report to justify the subordination of education to racial...
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Pins in the Carpet
The Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario has been training and cultivating great actors for years now—William Hutt, Maggie Smith, Brian Bedford, Marti Maraden, Alan Scarfe, and Martha Henry have all done beautiful work—probably some of their best—there. However, with the slight exception of Smith, none have made the transition to film. So to find Martha...
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Secret Sharers
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World Produced and distributed by 20th Century Fox Directed by Peter Weir Screenplay by Peter Weir and John Collee from Patrick O’Brian’s novels The Last Samurai Produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and Cruise-Wagner Productions Directed by Edward Zwick Screenplay by John Logan Magisterial sea yarner Patrick...
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The Jan. 6 Video Cover-Up
Hide and seek should be a game for children, not for ruthless feds. But here we are. An American citizen, innocent until proven guilty, is fighting for his freedom against a government juggernaut hell-bent on framing him as a violent Jan. 6 insurrectionist. One crucial key to clearing his name, his lawyer argues, lies in...
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Truth in Memory
In 2003, Carlos Eire, the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, published a memoir of his Cuban boyhood, Waiting for Snow in Havana. In a review of this book that appeared in The American Conservative, I suggested comparison with The Last Grove, the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti’s autobiography, or...
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Reflections on the Tragedy of the Hagia Sophia
In the Great Church where the holy gifts were revealed, the King of all, there came to them a voice from heaven, from the mouth of the angels: ‘Leave off your psalter, put away the holy gifts. Send word to the land of the Franks to come and take them: Let them come and take the...
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The Unsinkable Bibi Netanyahu
The recent Israeli Knesset elections surprised the world by returning Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party to power. The resounding win put Netanyahu on the path to becoming the longest serving PM in Israeli history and caused some consternation and disappointment both in the White House and Brussels. There are two main reasons for Bibi’s...
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A Meditation on a Meditation
“The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” —Jeremiah Why has the South had such a flowering of letters in the interval between World War I and the Korean War? Flannery O’Connor responded to that question by quoting the answer Walker Percy gave when he received the National...
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One Hell For Another
Karlo Štajner spent seven thousand days in Siberia and learned nothing. Of course the reader is moved by the awfulness of spending all that time in the Gulag, but still he is left only with the experience of a man who survived. Yet, for better or for worse, for many of the named victims, Štajner’s...
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NR’s Jihad Against Trump—and America
National Review’s jihad against Donald Trump turned against Americans themselves with Kevin Williamson’s screed, “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction.” He writes about such working-class cities as Wayne, Mich., where I grew up after I was born in 1955. To this day, one-sixth of the city is the...
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Huckabee’s Confederate Flag Fraud
Veterans of South Carolina politics have been waiting and wondering what the last minute stunt would be leading up to Saturday’s First-in-the-South bellwether Republican primary. I predicted it would be a Confederate flag stunt and begged the Ron Paul campaign to make his positions on the War Between the States better known, early on. The...
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Uncle Sam and the Third Balkan War
Whenever you hear the New World Order crowd whining about the obligation of the “international community” to come to the rescue of a “multiethnic democracy” threatened by “nationalism,” get ready for Uncle Sam to be dragged off on a fool’s errand. This term, “multiethnic democracy,” the prime exemplar of which is supposedly the United States,...
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Revolution and Its Discontents
Winner of France’s Renaudot Prize, this autobiographical Bildungsroman is a first-person narrative of a young man from a Belgian village who begins as a seminarian and ends as a disillusioned anarchist. Under the direction of his widowed mother and the village priest, he enters the seminary in Louvain, where his study of the changing values...
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To Arm or Not to Arm
To arm pilots or not to arm—that is, apparently, an even more important question than the debate over whether or not we should allow unions, seniority rules, and affirmative action to hamstring every new effort to preserve national security. George Bush wants a free hand with the unions, but his administration doesn’t want airline pilots...
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Proudhon, Beauty and Lego
When I first read in a Soviet history book of Proudhon’s famous dictum that property is theft, I thought there had been a mistake in the typesetting. Obviously, the author had meant to say that property was not theft, but the proofreader goofed, making an interesting and valid observation into a gross and vulgar absurdity. ...
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Is Trump’s Agenda Being Eclipsed?
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” said Winston Churchill to cheers at the Lord Mayor’s luncheon in London in November 1942. True to his word, the great man did not begin the liquidation. When his countrymen threw him out in July 1945,...
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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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On Agrarianism
I enjoyed Mark Winchell’s “Tracts Against Capitalism” (Vital Signs, January) when it presented facts regarding the Agrarians, but I must take issue with a number of his opinions. Peaceful Valley residents have more than two options regarding Wal-Mart. They could, for example, form a corporation (non-profit or otherwise) to buy the land in question, or...
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Becoming by Beholding
An important new book demonstrates the ways imagination is essential to Christianity.
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Secession and the New American Constitution
The nine states that ratified the Constitution on June 21, 1788, created an entirely new government. This government was not patterned after the one established under the Articles of Confederation, which was created by the 13 states just seven years before. The Articles actually transferred very little power to the agent they called the “central,”...
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Hollywood and Bethlehem
Hollywood loves Christmas, or Winterfest, or whatever they’re calling it these days. This is because many Americans make it the most wonderful time of the year for the studios, offering them gifts of gold. For example, on December 25, 2015, we gave Buena Vista/Disney $49.3 million for the right to spend 2 hours and 16...
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ISIS: Trump’s Unheralded Success
Considering the unprecedented obstacles President Trump is facing from various quarters in his attempts to devise a coherent foreign policy strategy (see my column in the September issue of Chronicles), the apparent success of his anti-ISIS approach thus far is both surprising and encouraging. It shows that realist pragmatism yields results. Over the past six...
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The Failure of the Canadian Right
The Canadian federal election in October confirmed a long-term, leftward trend in Canadian politics. Despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s blackface scandal, the Liberals retained power, winning a plurality of 157 out of 338 seats and 33.1 percent of the popular vote. Conservatives won 121 seats (34.4 percent of the vote), gaining truly overwhelming support from...
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TRUTH in Green Trousers
When the young American poet Ezra Pound arrived in London in the autumn of 1908, he had considerably more on his mind than a tour of Westminster Abbey and a boat ride down the Thames. He was determined to become a noted poet, and—convinced that his own country was little more than a cultural slum—he...
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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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Responding to Obscenities
I am not Charlie, nor will I ever be. Wearing a Je suis Charlie badge is one sure way of getting attention, but I will leave that to others. And another thing: Obscenity has no redeeming social value, and Charlie Hebdo was and is one long obscenity. But let’s start with that famous Parisian march...
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April in Paris
The banging was first heard somewhere in the Alsace countryside, an hour or so after the train left Basel. For some reason, local worthies invariably pronounce the city’s name the French way, making it sound like the pagan deity denounced by the Hebrew prophets. The temples of Baal, in this unconscious interpretation, are the ubiquitous...
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The End of Obamaworld
In denouncing Republicans as “scared of widows and orphans,” and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential. Clearly, he is upset. And with good reason. He grossly, transparently underestimated the ability of ISIS, the “JV” team, to strike outside the caliphate into...
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On Passage Back From India
Betsy Clarke’s informative and readable review of In Search of Love and Beauty by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Chronicles, Nov. 1985) raised the question of how we ought to regard homosexuality. Talking of the homosexuals on parade in Jhabvala’s novel, Clarke writes, “By stressing the fact that fathers were absent from the early homes of these...
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Frontier Fantasies
Folklore is not history, and mythmakers hate complications. Finally we have a reliable life of Boone through the considerable efforts of John Mack Faragher, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College whose earlier book Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979) won the American Historical Association’s prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award. Daniel Boone...
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Frum’s Firing
By now, many Chronicles readers have no doubt heard that David Frum was fired from his cushy job at the American Enterprise Institute, following an online column claiming that the passage of Obamacare was the GOP’s “Waterloo,” which could have been avoided if the GOP had been more willing to negotiate with Obama. Frum is...
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Reign of Terror: A Bastille-Day Meditation
On the anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille, an accounting of the sadistic Reign of Terror is in order.
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Effeminate Gospel, Effeminate Christians
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...
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Sold, Not Bought
If you want to understand our current financial woes, skip the economists and go directly to the premiere analyst of the Great Depression, James M. Cain. His 1943 novel Double Indemnity (originally a 1936 serial that ran in Liberty) explains far better than spreadsheets the moral origins of our present financial misadventure. Cain once remarked...