As Americans render what Catholics call temporal judgment on George Bush, are they aware of the radical course correction they are about to make? This center-right country is about to strengthen a liberal Congress whose approval rating is 10 percent and implant in Washington a regime further to the left than any in U.S. history....
10954 search results for: Post-Human Future
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Michigan’s Race Factor
The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 23 decision striking down the University of Michigan’s race-based undergraduate admissions policy ended a decade-long struggle started by university administrators and finished by conservative legislators and their grassroots supporters. On April 23, 1997, Michigan State Rep. David Jaye, a paleoconservative Republican from suburban Macomb County, sponsored an amendment to the...
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La Pasionaria of the Beltway
“Even a child is known by his doings.” —Proverbs 20:11 This book is at once a strange object and a peculiar event. To touch on the latter for a moment, it was excerpted before publication in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, which chose with an unerring eye those passages most damaging to Ronald Reagan...
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The Search for Salvation
There is a popularly held belief that the promise of theater resided throughout the country. According to the theory, if Broadway was dying, then American theater was thriving west of the Hudson and south of the Delaware Water Gap, nurturing not only the talent but also the audience. There has been a problem, of course,...
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Toward One Nation, Indivisible
It is time we looked at the world from a new perspective, one of enlightened nationalism. Cliches about a “new” global economy aside, there has always been an international economy—ever since Columbus stumbled onto the Western Hemisphere while seeking new trade routes to the East, in the hire of a nation-state, Spain. The Dutch East...
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Maybe It’s Not Time to Head for the Hills
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell recognizing a non-existent right to gay marriage in the Constitution, there have been numerous articles stating that America has accepted gay marriage and that social conservatives should now shut up. A variation of this theme has been taken up by certain social conservatives such as...
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The Ponderous and the Fleet
A review of Watchmen (produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures; directed by Zack Snyder; screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse) and Duplicity (produced and distributed by Universal Pictures; directed and written by Tony Gilroy) The title of Alan Moore’s 1986 comic-book series Watchmen alludes to the Roman satirist Juvenal, who asked, “Who watches...
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Marvelous Exhibitions
Nocturnal Animals Produced by Fade to Black Productions Directed and written by Tom Ford, based on Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan Distributed by Focus Features Doctor Strange Produced by Marvel and Disney Studios Directed and written by Scott Derrickson Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Erstwhile fashion designer turned film director Tom Ford seems to...
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Winter’s Poet
Robert Burns, born on this date in 1759, holds no high place today among academics. His genius continues to elude them, yet his poetry lives on in spite of them, recited and translated all over the world.
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Lobar Warming
Scoffers may deride the proposition I find instinctively plausible, that the consonants and the vowels of speech are its masculine and feminine constituents, though the same scoffers would not think to keep a professor from speaking of male rhymes or an electrician of female plugs. Yet the role of women in many societies, historically considered,...
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On the Death of Newspapers
This past week, word came to me that a close friend and book-review editor of a major daily newspaper had been laid off after 16 years of service. The book page, one of the nation’s best, would be reduced by half, and his “replacement” would be a youngster from the city desk, a competent young...
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Farage’s European Victory Upends British Politics
When the 751 Members of the new European Parliament (MEPs) gather in the French city of Strasbourg on July 2, the largest national group present in all the EU will be the MEPs of Britain’s new Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage. While the 29 newly elected Brexit Party MEPs intend to upend the EU,...
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Synthesizing Tyranny
Pace W.B. Yeats, mere anarchy is not loosed upon the world. What we enjoy in this country, and to a large extent in most other Western nations, is a bit more complicated than mere anarchy. It is, in fact, the unique achievement of the political genius of the modern era: what, in 1992, I called...
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Latino ‘Guerillas’ and the GOP
There is a picture in our family of my great-grandfather holding a Model 94 lever-action .30-30 carbine—”Treinta Treinta,” as it was affectionately called—with a cartridge belt strapped across his body. He fought in the Mexican Revolution with an American-made Winchester rifle. This little piece of family history pops into my mind now and then. Not...
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What the Editors Are Reading
I read Goethe’s Faust in college and had not looked into it again until the other day when, prompted by curiosity roused by Willi Jasper’s new book Lusitania: The Cultural History of a Catastrophe, I pulled a copy of the play off my shelf and began rereading with the idea of forming a better sense...
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Pictures Into Words
Readers of Chronicles already know that David Middleton is an extraordinarily accomplished poet. For much of the rest of the reading world, unfortunately, he is a well-kept secret. Living in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and teaching at Nicholls State University, he is far removed from the centers of literary power and influence. Even if that were not...
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Reluctance at Reveille
From the June 1997 issue of Chronicles. The global industrial revolution being engineered by multinational firms and the dismantling of international trade barriers have produced wrenching social changes and will unleash more. Rolling Stone National Editor William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (on the Federal Reserve) and Who Will Tell the People (on...
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Turkish Delights
Four weeks before the latest war against Iraq, President George W. Bush declared that it would be motivated by a “vision” of democracy and liberation for the entire Middle East. A U.S.-sponsored regime change in Baghdad, he proclaimed, would “serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.” Only...
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A Plague on Both Their Houses
What can you do to make the worst of a bad situation? The Democrats know how: they have decided (temporarily) to shaft their welfare-consuming constituents--by cutting out Food Stamps--in order to help teachers and other government
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On the Accordion
In Scott P. Richert’s otherwise fine article “Polka Can’t Die” (The Rockford Files, November 2004), I was somewhat pained by his only slightly veiled disdain for the accordion. Polka without accordion? As soulless as Bach on a Moog synthesizer! His aversion does place him in some traditional company. A Daumier cartoon has a character whose...
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What I Saw (and Prayed) in New Orleans
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always...
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Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan, like many of those in the lively arts, frequently urges us to admire his present work rather than to dwell on his past triumphs, although he has been known to make an exception to the rule when it comes time to release his latest greatest-hits package. Unlike some rock-music critics, I’m happy to...
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The Consent of the Governed Revisited
Americans have lost the habit of constitutional government. Judges hand down commands derived from their own personal revelation, in the teeth of law and majority rule, and are tamely obeyed by millions. A President, recently sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, announces his intention to commit the blood and treasure of the...
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What Is America’s Cause in the World?
“Take away this pudding; it has no theme,” is a comment attributed to Winston Churchill, when a disappointing dessert was put in front of him. Writers have used Churchill’s remark to describe a foreign policy that lacks coherence or centrality of purpose. For most of our lifetimes, this has not been true of the United...
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Putting the Law in Lawrence
Though America’s academics tend to the dyspeptic and hypercritical, on one day this past year, the campus mood was extraordinarily sunny. This past June, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, declaring unconstitutional a law prohibiting homosexual conduct. In the eyes of most academics, Lawrence represented an act...
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A ‘Woke’ Crusader at Germany’s Helm
Angela Merkel’s unprecedented 16 years in power came to an end on Dec. 8 when Olaf Scholz was sworn in as the new German chancellor, symbolically breaking with tradition by omitting “so help me God” from the oath. Scholz steered his Social Democratic Party (SPD) to the dominant position in last September’s general election by presenting...
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Realism of the Real
A century ago, the Kansas-born and Vermont-based writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher spoke of the importance of place, as well as of time, in the formation of a culture and in the shaping of individuals within a culture: Some wise man has said that the date of a man’s life depends not on the calendar, but...
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Elena Chudinova: Telling the Truth
In the autumn of 2005, I moved to New York City, breaking out of the green confines of bucolic and insufferably boring upstate New York to continue college. I wandered into one of the numerous Russian bookstores on Brighton Beach—a noisy, dirty, and delicious corner of the Soviet Union, preserved on the southernmost tip of...
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No News Is Good News
Why does anyone follow the news? I am not referring to people who more or less have to know what is being said about current events. Investors, naturally, want to know about the rumors that can drive markets up or down, and politicians and their advisors have to study the media the way a deer...
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Hardened Line
Vladimir Putin, prodded by a reporter’s question regarding the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, remarked that Russia, for “economic and political” reasons, “has no interest in the defeat of the United States.” Putin’s comments were seen by Russian media observers as a sign that the Kremlin had come full circle on the Iraq question. ...
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John Yoo, Totalitarian
John Yoo stands outside the Anglo-American legal tradition. His views lead to self-incrimination wrung out of a victim by torture. He believes a president of the United States can initiate war, even on false pretenses, and then use the war he starts as cover for depriving U.S. citizens of habeas corpus protection. A U.S. attorney...
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Fell Out of Ranks
Patrick J. Buchanan had not even formally announced his candidacy for the White House last November than a platoon of the Beltway right suddenly fell out of ranks to denounce him and his challenge to George Bush. Divisive, polarizing, protectionist, nativist, xenophobic, anti-Zionist, anti- Semitic, ultra-nationalist, racist were the predictable sobriquets that buzzed from their...
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Who Pays the “Tort Tax”?
The United States, of all Western legal systems, is probably the harshest on manufacturers, at least insofar as they can be held liable for millions or even billions of dollars in damages for unanticipated defects in their products. Until about the middle of the 20th century, liability standards in this country were not significantly different...
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Openings and Closings
Raphael Israeli examines one of the most difficult political problems of our time: The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He approaches the subject by presenting and analyzing research on the conflict by earlier Israeli historians (the so-called Old Historians), by more recent Israeli historians (the so-called New Historians who coined the label Old...
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The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told the Southern Center for International Studies,...
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On Intelligence and Race
Samuel Francis is among America’s best publicists. It is thus painful to read his praise (March 1995) of three materialist, pro-robot scientists, particularly the most materialist of the three, for whom civilization is determined by cold versus hot climates and their “cognitive demands.” In Philippe Rushton laudatio, Francis quotes the barbaric passage: “the cognitive demands...
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The Old West’s Deadly Doctor
Most Americans know of Doc Holliday only as Wyatt Earp’s sidekick. He was much more than that. He was not only one of the most colorful characters in the Old West but also one of the most feared. He acquired the nickname “Doc” honestly, earning a degree in dentistry and practicing in several towns. However,...
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The Profiteering Migrant-Industrial Complex
Migrants complain about rotten food. The worst rot is inside the Adams administration's handling of this emergency.
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Letter From Central America
World attention focused on Managua several months ago, as leaders of the Socialist world, led by Fidel Castro, converged on Nicaragua for the most stupendous Marxist levee since Ethiopia’s $100 million bash for Colonel Mengistu. Meanwhile, thousands of Nicaraguan campesinos, dubbed “contras” by their enemies, continued to risk their lives in a voluntary, patriotic, and...
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The Golden State’s Lavender Jacobins
You knew it would come to this. So did I. And yet one is still surprised by the sheer boldness of it all. From my local paper: California public schools do an inadequate job of teaching students about gay and lesbian history, despite a 2011 law that requires schools to teach such lessons, according to...
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Tuition for America
“Commerce is a perpetual and peaceable war of wit and energy among the nations” wrote the 17th-century French statesman Jean Baptiste Colbert. He likened his Grandes Compagnies, state chartered trading companies, to “armies” attacking the economic foundations of rival nations. Colbert’s primary target was the Dutch, whose economic leadership was also being undermined by the...
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Reservation Blues: Notes From Indian Country
Just outside Tucson, Arizona, lies a foreign country. It is not Mexico, although that is close by, but Tohono O’odham Nation, an Indian reservation the size of Connecticut that is home to some 30,000 people. Larger than many countries, the Tohono O’odham Nation is a place of astonishing and austere beauty. Seldom visited, it harbors...
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The Democrats’ Bait and Switch
Former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland told the Democratic convention that Barack Obama was an “economic patriot” and blasted Mitt Romney for being an “outsourcing pioneer.” That is certainly the theme of the Obama campaign in the industrial Midwest. Any television left on in Ohio for more than 15 minutes is likely to broadcast an attack...
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Losing Their Vitality
H.L. Mencken, in 1923, noted the “amalgamation of the two great parties. Both have lost their old vitality, all their old reality; neither, as it stands today, is anything more than a huge and clumsy machine for cadging jobs. They do not carry living principles into their successive campaigns; they simply grab up anything that...
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The Crash of the Greed Machine
“Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.” —Acts, 20 The Big Board’s 508-point market meltdown was investigated by presidential commission, Congress, the SEC, and the major stock exchanges. Each of these bodies concluded that stocks fell because they were already much too high....
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Fairabia
Most Americans wouldn’t like it if they knew that a foreign government had built a school in the United States which teaches hatred of Americans and their country. Indeed, most Americans wouldn’t like it if they knew a foreign government had built a school here that teaches hatred of anyone or anything. Then again, most...
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In Praise of Christian Walls
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis declared on his flight back to Rome last week.The political implications of his statement have been considered in some detail in recent days, but his assertion also needs to be examined in the light...
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Life in the Happy Valley
My friend Dr. Bob grew up in a coal town called Packard in eastern Kentucky, a place that was abandoned years ago. All that is left these days is kudzu growing over old foundations. He’s a neurosurgeon in Louisville now, and an amateur Kentucky historian, and my favorite tale of his is about the blue...
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Books In Brief: June-July 2024
Short reviews of The English Experience, by Julie Schumacher, and The Novel, Who Needs It?, by Joseph Epstein.