What an inspiring book this is! Even though the trials of the literary life are notorious and banal, there are few of us who are sufficiently hardened to the blows that we don’t at least on occasion allow our guard to fall and make the mistake of taking the kicks and pricks personally. Old pro...
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Obama and Islam: The Score
President Barack Obama’s tirade on June 14 was filled with angry passion. His rhetoric was not directed against the perpetrator of the Orlando attack and his ilk, however, but against the (unnamed) GOP nominee and others who do not subscribe to Obama’s fundamental views on the nature of Islam and his “strategy” of confronting the...
“Socialism of Fools”
Anti-Semitism, said August Bebel, was the “socialism of fools.” Murray Rothbard has responded similarly to the reckless imputation of anti-Semitic motives by neoconservatives and their clients, saying that “Anti-anti-Semitism has become the conservatism of fools.” The non-responsiveness of journalists and intellectuals to the gentile-bashing of Alan Dershowitz suggests that the problem underlined by Professor Rothbard...
Qin, Hadrian, Trump
A frequent English correspondent from Stratford-upon-Avon who contributes regularly to this magazine wrote recently to express the frustration mockers of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Wall have been causing him. Hadrian’s Wall, he pointed out, begun in a.d. 122 by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to keep the Picts and other barbarians from invading England from the...
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...
Is It Really All Our Fault?
As Middle America rises in rage against “fast track” and the mammoth Obamatrade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, The Wall Street Journal has located the source of the malady. Last Monday’s lead editorial began: “Here we go again. In the 1990s Pat Buchanan launched a civil war within the Republican Party on a platform...
Bleep You, Liberals!
Political correctness has, since the 1990’s, been a tool the left has used to silence the proponents of traditional morality, society, and culture. Under the banner of “sensitivity,” which has the veneer of a Higher Morality, p.c. has infected the university, the high school, the grade school, the media, business, public office, and public discourse. ...
On Transnationalism
In Bill Kauffman’s sermon “World Citizens on Main Street” (March 1997), he decries the purchase of a local Batavia, New York, tractor factory by a German firm as an example of foreign “Teutonic overlords . . . tied to Batavia only by the flimsy cord of the almighty dollar.” Using such epithets as “executioners” and...
Letter to the Bishop
Your Excellency: A few years have passed since we corresponded. After my last letter to you, I’m afraid I took a wrong path, crashed and burned, and now stagger forward, burdened by more ordinary trespasses. But still a believer, grateful, as Graham Greene had the wheezing old priest murmur at the end of Brighton Rock,...
Busspotting
On my short list of Great Equalizers, I would jot “The Chainsaw,” “The Automobile,” and “The Internet” without hesitation. In a separate category dubbed Great Equalizing Experiences, I would begin with the axiomatic two: “Death” and “Taxes.” My next entry would be century-specific: “Bus Travel.” I’ve experienced bus travel in many places, primarily in countries...
Are the Bells Tolling for Amy, Liz, and Joe?
By the end of February, the race for the Democratic nomination may have come down to a choice of one of three white men. Two are well into their 70s, and either would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. The third is a 38-year-old gay in a same-sex marriage who would be our youngest president...
Right From the Beginning
Chronicles contributing editor Tom Piatak wishes Patrick J. Buchanan a happy 70th birthday. [Link courtesy of VDare.com.] Share This
Easy to Vote, Easy to Cheat
Peruse left-wing media reports and Twitter trends and one will discover that claims that “Trump won” are labeled as misinformation. Polling numbers, however, show that many Americans hold exactly the opposite view, and think that Biden’s claim to the presidency is questionable. Underlying such contention is the thorny question of who is and who...
Commendables
Thinking Clearly About War by Gary Jason James Turner Johnson: Can Modern War Be Just?; Yale University Press; New Haven. There is nothing quite so fatuous as the nuclear pacifism currently fashionable among leftist theologians and their ilk. Visions of mushroom clouds (brought on by repeated viewings of On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove)...
The Greatest Error of the Homeschool
There is little question or doubt in the public mind about the value of the homeschool. Homeschooled kids better behaved than children from public schools. homeschooled youngsters seldom become involved in gangs, seldom use drugs to excess, and there are absolutely no reports of a homeschooled teenager committing suicide (contrasted with the several thousand public schooled...
The Lewis Gun
[Lewis: Painter and Writer, by Paul Edwards (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) 584 pp. $75.00] Professor Edwards has set himself to a daunting task in taking on Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). Lewis the painter is a difficult task for many reasons: first, because he attacked the British art establishment early on, trashing Roger Fry...
Make Yourself at Home
“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...
Syria: A Predictable Failure
U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi wrapped up the first round of the “Geneva II” negotiations last Friday reporting little progress. No ceasefire was agreed, and talks on a transitional government never began. The next round is scheduled for February 10, but its prospects are dim. The opposing sides predictably blame each other for the stalemate, but in any...
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...
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...
Tribalism Returns to Europe
Is Europe’s adventure in international living about to end? At Potsdam, Germany, this weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the young conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union that Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society where people “live side by side and enjoy each other” has “failed, utterly failed.” Backing up her rueful admission are...
The Alphaville Dictionary III
Ponzio’s iconic diner (in South Jersey) is turning 50; designer Milton Glaser is creating an iconic environmental logo for his line of eye ware; steel and Domino’s sugar are iconic industries; Smokey Bear is an iconic symbol of wildfire prevention; and Roberts Shoe store—an iconic Chicago institution—is closing its doors. These are just a few...
Understanding the Airline Industry
United Airlines’ December 9 bankruptcy filing came as no surprise to those who understand the airline industry, in which even America’s most successful living investor, Warren E. Buffet, could not turn a profit. Buffett once observed, “In a business selling a commodity-type product it’s impossible to be a lot smarter than your dumbest competitor.” Mr....
We Can’t Vote Ourselves Out of This: Organizing a Middle American Resistance
The American right needs a Middle American resistance united in its focus on internal secession and self-government, one that does not rely on national politics or bet on political saviors.
How the Historical Novel Has Changed!
Should one read Hervey Allen or Anne Rice? Why should the question be asked at all? Why might a discriminating reader today even think of picking up either Hervey Allen’s massive best-seller of 1933, Anthony Adverse, or The Feast of All Saints (1979) by Anne Rice, a hugely popular contemporary author? (Both are still available...
The Way We Are Now—Sigh!
“For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth with darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness.”—Ecclesiastes 6:4 “Where the word of a king is, there is power: and who may say unto him, What doest thou?”—Ecclesiastes 8:4 “Our” President says that those of us who blame Islam for terrorism are as bad as...
Can American Legal Education Be Fixed?
Something has gone radically awry with legal education and maybe even legal practice. For about a decade now, the loudest wailing over the state of affairs has come from Chief Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who wrote a landmark article in the Michigan Law Review...
Seventy Years Old and an NBA Star (in My Mind)
I’m 70 years old, 5’7”, and a bit past my ideal measurement on the Body Mass Index. Let’s say I wake up tomorrow morning, look at myself in the mirror, and suddenly decide I’m capable of hitting three pointers in the National Basketball Association. I see myself soaring through the air like Michael Jordan, ball...
Aliens: The Good and the Bad
Arrival 21 Laps Entertainment Directed by Denis Villeneuve Screenplay by Eric Heisserer based on Ted Chiang’s novella Distributed by Paramount Pictures Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Produced by Film4 and TriStar Pictures Directed by Ang Lee Screenplay by Jean-Christophe Castelli from Ben Fountain’s novel Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing When is the last time you...
Gnostic Epiphanies
Cormac McCarthy, 56-years-old, is the author of five published novels, which between them have sold approximately fifteen thousand copies in the original hardcover editions, published by Random House. (The Ecco Press, in New York City, is maintaining these titles in print in paperback.) Born in Rhode Island, reared in Tennessee, and traveled in Europe, McCarthy...
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...
Recalling the Case Against Female Suffrage
I was asked once on a radio show whether the arguments I was making against feminism wouldn’t also lead me to oppose women voting. I pointed out that though I personally favored giving women the vote, the case against female suffrage was a very respectable one, and was most visibly urged by women when female...
Three Coins
The weather in Rome has been on the chilly side, but compared with Rockford in January, it’s positively balmy. Warm enough, in fact, to risk a charge of heresy (or at least philistinism) by capping the first full day of The Rockford Institute’s 2008 Winter School with, not a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, but a...
Our Un-American ‘Justice’ System
The U.S. criminal justice system is on the side of the illegal alien criminal and his judicial coddlers, not Americans.
An Island in the Aegean
“Why go to the Greek islands? Why go to Greece? Why not sit for a few minutes under a sunlamp, nip over to the supermarket for a slab of plasticized feta, and get some sirtaki going on your iPod?” The question is not entirely rhetorical, I said to Andreas. With his wife Evagelia, Andreas Petrakis...
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...
Mike Pence’s Rank Hypocrisy
On July 26 Vice President Michael (“Mike”) Pence addressed the first “Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom” in Washington D.C. Pence opened his remarks by asserting that “religious freedom is a top priority of this administration,” that this “most fundamental of freedoms . . . is in the interest of the peace and security of the...
A Suppressed Embarrassment
A book that has failed to go anywhere internationally, contrary to the author’s expectation, is a recent study by a Chilean Jewish academic who teaches philosophy at the University of Berlin, Victor Farías. His work deals with the youthful thought and career of Salvador Allende, who, between 1970 and 1973, headed the Marxist Government of...
Back to the Past to Find Strength for the Future
In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote of the American Revolution, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” His words fit 2020-2021 like a glove. As we all know, our country is in turmoil. We have battled a virus for almost a year, wearing masks and suffering lockdowns, with dubious results. Fraud and deceit marked our...
Books Do Furnish a Room…
A commenter on my Daily Mail Blog asked me a few questions about “modern” verse, specifically what I thought of Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. A political blog with a shelf-life of three days is no place to discuss “the permanent things” (to borrow a famous phrase from Eliot himself), and I have...
Return of the Kings
In a television appearance on January 7, President Emmanuel Macron of France, rather than addressing his compatriots exclusively, directed his remarks to his “fellow citizens of the E.U.,” saying, “2018 is a very special year, and I will need you this year.” Macron, a former investment banker and cabinet minister in the Socialist government of...
On Monolithic Catholics
I enjoyed reading Paul Gottfried’s review of my book The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing (“The Rest of the Story,” January), but I was puzzled by what he calls “the obvious counterarguments” to my position. The most obvious, he claims, is that “Catholic Democrats . . . were instrumental in bringing about...
The End of Truth
“What is Truth?” is a question that has been around since the Greeks. One can speak of moral truth as well as aesthetic truth, yet scientific truth seems to be the only one that’s undeniable. And yet, even though there’s scientific proof the world is round, those who deny it can still live normal lives...
The Business of Escape
Peter Mayle has dominated the nonfiction best-seller lists in recent years with his chronicles of life in the south of France. A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence (both published in the United States in 1991) even spawned a fourpart television series, which was produced by the BBC and has run regularly on the Arts...
Is Afghanistan a Failed Mission?
As in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973, the year our prisoners of war came home, America did not lose a major battle in Afghanistan. Yet we did not win the war. South Vietnam was lost. And contrary to the message awaiting President George W. Bush when he landed on the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which...
Books in Brief: February 2022
Christianity and Social Justice, by Jon Harris (Reformation Zion Publishing; 160 pp., $14.99). In this slim discussion of social justice and its relationship, or non-relationship, to Christianity, Jon Harris, a Protestant theologian and Baptist minister, addresses the topic long after he observed the “incursion made by the social justice movement” into the Baptist seminary where he...
Will America Truly Change?
“America has changed” has been the media’s new mantra since September 11. But what has America changed into? Reporters have fanned out across the country seeking those changes, and they have filled the airwaves and pages with their findings. Some who have been interviewed talked in the abstract about how they do not take as...
Trouble With Iran
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on October 26 that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Invoking the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, he told an audience of 4,000 cheering students that a new conflict in Palestine would soon remove “this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world.” The statement, made in the midst...
Pigs Is Pigs
Politics is like the weather: No matter how blue in the face we talk ourselves, no matter how many virgins we sacrifice to Odin, our leaders do not improve, and the drought continues. The fates who determine the destinies of nations are no more obedient to our words than the little gods of wind and...
Our Immigration Problems
Our immigration problems briefly received national attention last year when boatloads of illegal Chinese migrants landed on American shores. Yet, because many of these illegals made bogus claims of political asylum, some political leaders spoke as if asylum abuse were the only real problem. Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) set the record straight when he observed...