“‘Aren’t there any grown-ups at all?’ ‘I don’t think so.’” William Golding, Lord of the Flies In an inner-city school beset by truancy, the presence of a 13-year-old pupil an hour before the first lesson suggests something is amiss. “Good morning, Kim,” I said. “What brings you in so early?” Kim didn’t answer immediately. ...
10948 search results for: Post-Human Future
Post
Biden-Media ‘Insurrection’ Big Lie
The casual characterization of Jan. 6 as an “insurrection” is unjust and it appears to be creating a backlash, at least among Republicans.
Post
A Bard, By Any Other Name . . .
“Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?” —R.W. Emerson Story-telling is a feature of all societies. If the world is to make sense, if we are to live together in families, cities, nations, if we are to do our daily work, if life is to be livable at all, we must tell...
Post
A Potent Symbol
Little Rock, Arkansas, is still a potent symbol 40 years after the forcible integration of Central High School. That’s why President Clinton chose Central High as the site of a speech in late September, one of many that he intends to deliver on race relations over the coming year. Paralyzed by the numerous scandals that...
Post
The Libyan Stalemate
The Libyan operation is being quietly aborted, barely three weeks after its ill-conceived onset. There will be no mission creep, no American boots on the ground, and no arming and training of the rebel forces. The impending stalemate is the least of all evils. It is preferable to an open-ended escalation or to an...
Post
Black Hole Singing
There are three basic types of complexity a reader encounters in contemporary poetry. The first type arises when inexperienced poets have not yet developed sufficient intellectual and emotional depth to understand their subject matter or have not yet developed an adequate command of language. The resulting product is muddled rather than deep. The second is...
Post
The Grass in American Streets
During his debate with Citizen Perot, Vice President Al Gore joined a distinguished list of misinformed public officials when he bashed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Senator Reed Smoot and Congressman Willis Hawley “raised tariffs,” Gore said, “and it was one of the principle causes . . . of the Great Depression.” Predictably, the national press jumped...
Post
The Buchanan Revolution, Part II
The greatest irony of the periodic political revolutions that occur in American democracy is that most of the voters who make them possible have not the foggiest notion of what they are doing. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt won the White House by promising to balance the budget and reduce the scale and power of the...
Post
Théâtre Syrien
There are several conflicting narratives on who is doing what to whom in Syria, and why. That a false-flag operation was followed by an act of aggression by the U.S. and its European satellites is clear. Everything else is murky. Three initial impressions deserve particular attention. 1. False flags work if they are supported by...
Post
A Fire Bell in the Night for Norway
“Like a fire bell in the night,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1820, “this momentous question … awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” Jefferson was writing of the sudden resurgence of the slavery issue in the debate on Missouri’s entry into the Union, as...
Post
Yes, We Have Bananas… in All Shapes and Sizes
“Yes, we have no bananas” was a hit song from the 1920s. Here a Greek fruit vendor answers all questions with “yes,” even when the answer is negative. In today’s America, we have lots of bananas. First, of course, are the curved yellow fruits sold in bunches. You may be living in Alaska or Massachusetts, with a...
Post
THE LEGACY OF LINCOLN—February 2009
PERSPECTIVE Rendering Unto Lincoln by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Treasury of Counterfeit Virtue by Clyde Wilson Abe’s indulgence. Obama as Lincoln by Justin Raimondo Mask and mirror. Lincolnism Today by Daniel Larison The long marriage of centralized power and concentrated wealth. NEWS The Financial Crisis by William J. Quirk How it happened, and why it is still happening. REVIEWS Strippers to the Rescue by Stephen B. Presser William ...
Post
Prudence Isn’t Fear
Last week saw two particularly grisly Islamic terror attacks of the type that have become all too common: 22 people, mostly children and teenagers, were killed after a bomb exploded at a pop concert in Manchester, England, and 28 Egyptian Copts, including young children, were massacred when ISIS ambushed their bus, which was taking them...
Post
The Midwestern Identity
The distinctive regional "America," composed of Midwestern German and Scandinavian enclaves, lasted barely four decades, dying as a coherent entity sometime in the early 1950s.
Post
Idling, Week 2
Friday, September 16 The Paul and I are on the radio at 3 (CDT), but I’m not sure what we do next Friday when I will have just finished cena in Siracusa. Anyone catch Pat Robertson’s words of wisdoms on why it is OK to divorce a spouse with Alzheimer’s because they are more...
Post
Nelson Mandela Idolized?
Nelson Mandela idolized? Am I the only one who didn’t do a spastic street dance over his arrival in America? Tell him to take “power” in the wrong African language? California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown said being with Mandela was like “being in the presence of God.” A worshiper along the parade route in New...
Post
Arguing With Apes
It was all the way back in 1860, when Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, participated in an open debate with T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s leading supporter, that at least for England the evolutionary debate was effectively decided once and for all. The bishop was judged to have lost the argument by virtue of his memorably snide...
Post
Would War With Iran Doom Trump?
A war with Iran would define, consume and potentially destroy the Trump presidency, but exhilarate the neocon never-Trumpers who most despise the man. Why, then, is President Donald Trump toying with such an idea? Looking back at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, wars we began or plunged into, what was gained to justify the...
Post
Greek Honor and Squad Shame
Sailing in Homer’s wine-dark Aegean Sea, and traipsing all over the Acropolis and the marvels of antiquity, is the best antidote I know to the brouhaha over “The Squad.” It makes these four publicity-seeking, opportunistic mental dwarfs seem even pettier than they are. Mind you, these petulant females wouldn’t know the difference between Corinthian and...
Post
Forgetting Prisoner X
In the early months of 2010, a prisoner was brought to one of Israel’s most secure prisons, the Ayalon facility in Ramla, and put in a cell designed to hold the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin. None of the prison personnel were told so much as his name, nor was anything known about his alleged crime. ...
Post
Boris Johnson’s Blood Sports
“The washing of the spears,” was the Zulu term for victory in battle. The latest phase in the Tory civil war has seen a brutal triumph of the Brexiteers, with no quarter extended to the vanquished. Of Theresa May’s Cabinet of 23, 16 have fallen as in an Elizabethan Revenge tragedy. It turns out that...
Post
Hey, Macarena!
(Editor’s note: The world, we are told, is shrinking, and all of us are coming to share the same global superculture. However, this brief report from a Slovakian college girl shows what happens to a commercial dance craze when it is taken up by an ancient community living on the fringe of Europe and transformed...
Post
When We Were Kings
You ain’t a pimp and you ain’t a hustler. A pimp’s got a Caddy and a lady got a Chrysler. —“Young American,” by David Bowie Each year, on the third Saturday of August, people line the sidewalks along Woodward Avenue in Detroit for the annual Dream Cruise. In the ambiance of the affluent northern suburbs...
Post
Black Op, Continued
Last Wednesday I wrote in this space that Chechnya’s strongman Ramzan Kadyrov put pay to my own feeble attempts at black humor when he said there was “not the slightest doubt” that the assassination of Nemtsov had been the work of the Western secret services. Since then the joke has grown even funnier – so...
Post
California Dreaming
Pedro Gonzalez reflects on the rapid decline and potential comeback of his home state—California.
Post
The Life and Times of Victor Davis Hanson
In reading through the works of popular historian Victor Davis Hanson, I was reminded of a parody in an episode of The Simpsons. Bart and Homer watch a clip of Rainier Wolfcastle—the show’s Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque action hero—fly a UNICEF cargo plane full of pennies to impoverished children. A villainous cadre calling themselves the “CommieNazis” chase Wolfcastle in their...
Post
Israel’s Judicial Reform Shows Growing Left-Right Divide Among Jews
The division among Jews worldwide regarding Israeli judicial reforms represents a growing gulf between Jewish liberals and conservatives, or "globalists" and "localists."
Post
Almost an Idol
Why does the South adore Stonewall Jackson? He was not a particularly lovable man. And he was certainly not a romantic, dashing cavalier, like Jeb Stewart; a stainless aristocrat calmly daring all the odds, like Robert E. Lee; or even a wizard of the saddle, like Bedford Forrest. Yet at Stone Mountain, Georgia—the Confederacy’s Mount...
Post
The First Firestorm
That hysterical reaction to the travel ban announced Friday is a portent of what is to come if President Donald Trump carries out the mandate given to him by those who elected him. The travel ban bars refugees for 120 days. From Syria, refugees are banned indefinitely. And a 90-day ban has been imposed on...
Post
What’s the Mama Grizzly Up To?
When Sarah Palin, in a rambling lakeside announcement last July in Wasilla, said she was quitting as governor of Alaska because of the abuse she and her family were taking from petty politicians and a feral press, she was written off as dead by the pundits. “A quitter, can’t take the heat,” was the Beltway...
Post
Denied Justice
Joe Occhipinti continues to be denied justice. As Greg Kaye reported in the October 1993 Chronicles, Occhipinti was the highly decorated undercover agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service who was framed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for doing his job too well. Fluent in three languages, Occhipinti had distinguished himself as an expert...
Post
Come Home, America
Unanesthetized amputation cannot be more painful than enduring—no, “endurin'”—a Bruce Springsteen monologue about “growin’ up.” Stopping a concert dead in its tracks, he’ll mumble and stammer and “uh, like” his way through a tortured and tortuous tale peopled with Wild Billy and Sloppy Sue and, best of all, “there was this guy.” He shoots for...
Post
Are the Good Times Over for Joe?
“When sorrows come,” said King Claudius, “they come not single spies but in battalions.” As the king found out. So it seems with President Joe Biden, who must be asking himself the question Merle Haggard asked: “Are the good times really over for good?” Consider the critical issue with voters today: the state of the...
Post
Work of Human Hands
The priest had just closed the volume by Thomas à Kempis on the bookmark and put away what was left of the bottle of wine when the telephone rang. He answered it reluctantly and recognized Mrs. Corelli’s voice on the line, begging him to hurry and saying that the doctor was already on his way....
Post
Iraq as “Intelligence Failure”: We Told You So
“W,” a.k.a. “our Commander in Chief,” is apparently even more blindly stubborn and willfully ignorant than I had thought. As of this writing (December 2006), he is still distancing himself from the Iraq Study Group’s efforts to provide him cover for a withdrawal from the Middle East morass he has drawn us into. Bush Senior,...
Post
Is the Game Worth the Candle?
“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” —Matthew 16:26 Our Lord taught us all about bad bargains. To lose your own soul and to receive in exchange that mere...
Post
Gorbachev and the Market
No doubt Gorbachev has been entirely misunderstood in the West, and continues to be. The primary myth is that glasnost and perestroika represented fundamental change from the Soviet past. They did not establish Western-style economic or political freedom, as the media led Americans to believe. Instead, each was designed to “improve and perfect” the workings...
Post
Inside History’s Dustbin
Ever since I committed the blunder, nearly 30 years ago, of signing up with the “conservative movement” during my first year in graduate school, a certain pattern of behavior has enforced itself on my decreasingly callow mind. The pattern, as a colleague of mine once remarked to me, is that there seems to be no...
Post
COVID-19 in the Light of History
Serious epidemics can have far-reaching social, cultural, and geopolitical consequences. The plague which devastated Athens in 430 BC—in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, when an Athenian victory still seemed within reach—claimed a quarter of the population, some 75,000 people including Pericles. His successors were weak and incompetent, and Athens suffered a precipitous decline...
Post
New Skins, Old Wine
For almost 2,000 years, Christians have been confessing Jesus Christ as God and Savior in the assurance that they knew enough about Him to justify making this confession. From the earliest days of Christianity, its adversaries have repeatedly challenged the facts and doctrines recorded about Christ in the four canonical Gospels and in the great...
Post
Yeats: A Second Coming
W. B. Yeats: The Poems; Edited by Richard J. Finneran; Macmillan; New York When Yeats died in 1939 his poetry had not been completely collected and there was some doubt over the right text. His widow was involved in the editing of his work and she had strong and sometimes wrong ideas about...
Post
“Finally We are Free”
The cry of the protestors in Cairo, as they greet the news of the military coup that has toppled Hosni Mubarak. What’s next? An interim government, perhaps the troika proposed by Mohammed El Baradei, with the reality of power remaining in the hands of the military. Then comes the countdown to the day when the...
Post
Polynesian Postcards from Dr. Freud
A number of people in the movie reviewing business are busy commenting on whether the team of Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson in 1984 measures up to Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in 1935 and/or Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando in 1962. This smacks of handicapping midget tag-team wrestling matches, so let’s ignore that whole...
Post
Democrats Fear RFK, Jr.
Anti-Kennedy lawfare from the Democrats may propel Harris into the White House.
Post
Ladies Against the Constitution
On balance, would you say you are for or against gun violence? How about motherhood? Pro or con? How about keeping firearms away from children? I know that these are all contentious debates nowadays, and that most of us have to think awfully hard before deciding such questions. Somehow, though, I suspect that a decent...
Post
Minneapolis Ignores the Real Problem Underlying Increase in Violent Child Deaths
The city that witnessed the death of George Floyd is seeing more deaths this year, only this time they aren’t those of a full-grown man arrested for passing a counterfeit bill: they are the deaths of children caught in crossfire. The most recent death was that of six-year-old Aniya Allen, who was shot in the...
Post
Liberty and Justice–For Jerks
Thanksgiving is the time of year when Americans are supposed to take stock and give thanks. The mere fact that we can take stock should make us grateful to be alive and conscious. This Thanksgiving, I am particularly thankful that I don’t have to go anywhere by plane. Over the past three or...
Post
The Sheriff and the Goatman
“May not a man have several voices . . . as well as two complexions?” —Nathaniel Hawthorne In George Garrett’s stories the conflict often arises between a wild lone Outsider and a generally conscientious but insecure Establishment figure; in Peter Taylor’s stories the conflict is likely to take place between generations, the revolt of the...
Post
Bill Clinton and the Ground Zero Mosque: A Perfect Fit
Former President Bill Clinton declared his strong support for the Ground Zero mosque in an interview broadcast on September 12. He also suggested a clever new spin to the promoters of the project. Much or even most of the controversy, he said, “could have been avoided, and perhaps still can be, if the people who want...
Post
Sins of Omission
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is that, as Mark Noll puts it, “there is not much of an evangelical mind”; that, despite all their other virtues, “American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been for several generations”; and that, at a popular level, “modern American evangelicals have failed notably...