The heroic age of modern poetry has been over for some time. The learned reactionaries who shaped it for two generations have all been dead for many years: Eliot (1965) and Pound (1972), Valéry (1945) and Claudel (1955), Ungaretti (1970) and Montale (1981). Diverse in style and technique, the great modernists were all ambitious in...
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Enemies Within and Above
Within a few hours of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September, it had become commonplace for even high-ranking government officials and elected leaders to say publicly that Americans would just have to get used to fewer constitutional liberties and personal freedoms than they have traditionally enjoyed. Of course,...
Beyond All the Shouting
While Cold Mountain, the admittedly well-wrought novel about a Confederate deserter, has achieved bestseller status, a story of a quite different sort has gained a modest but devoted readership and demonstrated anew the gifts of one of America’s finest writers. Nashville 1864 is a mere 129 pages long. Still, it is best not read in...
Charities Off the Dole
As of June 1, residents of the Land of Lincoln are free to enter into civil unions, which allow same-sex couples to enjoy the benefits, protections, and responsibilities under Illinois law that are granted to spouses. According to the richly appointed homosexual-rights movement that lavished funds and exerted pressure upon the politicians who passed the...
Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music
I had long been in search of a pretext for writing a column on sex, drugs, and classical music when I discovered that, by extraordinary coincidence, just such a subtitle adorned Blair Tindall’s memoir, Mozart in the Jungle (2005). The televised series of the same name seemed also to feature much sex, drugs, and classical...
Obama’s Pope
Mr. Neumayr’s comprehensive and exhaustive work, a fine example of investigative journalism, should deeply worry Catholics, laity and clerics alike. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the first Latin-American pope in Catholicism’s centuries-long history. He is also, Neumayr quips, “the Pope they have been waiting for,” whose messages support Marxists and Marxism, shockingly unlike the statements issued...
The Passion
Mel Gibson’s movie “on the last 12 hours of Jesus’ life” has stirred up all sorts of passions among interested observers the world over. The Passion, directed by Gibson and produced by Gibson’s film company, Icon Productions, is scheduled to be released sometime during the Lenten season of 2004. The goal of this ambitious project,...
Biden Voters’ Remorse
There seems to be a widespread belief that Joe Biden has exceeded the mandate for which he was elected. It seems we’re supposed to believe that those who voted for the Biden-Harris ticket craved moderation after Trump’s troubled and unsettling presidency. Writer and commentator Scott Jennings repeats this familiar narrative in a recent interview with...
Counterrevolution in Toyland
Among the hottest selling items in toy stores across the land is the “G.I. Joe” series of military action figures. Since the “Star Wars” movies, war toys have made a strong comeback from their depressed levels during the “antiwar” 1970’s. Model figures based on “Star Wars” characters proved so successful that others quickly entered the...
The Vanity Press Remains
When, in 2009, a shady Russian oligarch and his foppish son took over London’s Evening Standard, the great British journalist Perry Worsthorne remarked, “I think it’s one more example that we are no more a serious nation.” Well, Perry, you were right, but I suspect even you didn’t see how silly British high society could...
Derail Fast Track!
Last November, Republicans grew their strength in Congress to levels unseen since 1946. What united the party and rallied the nation was the GOP’s declared resolve to stand up to an imperious president. Give us powerful new majorities, said John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, and we shall halt these usurpations of Congressional power. And, so,...
The Triumph of the Secular
Having failed to establish much of a numerical presence in American society, the Episcopal Church, USA, succeeds in attracting attention by the continuing antics of a long parade of outrageous ecclesiastics. In 2003, attention focused on the ordination of openly homosexual Vicky Imogene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. While I am reluctant to add...
See Rudy and John Run
In July 1861, the Union Army marched out of the capital to meet the Confederates forming up at Manassas. Washingtonians packed picnic lunches and followed to enjoy the rebel rout. By nightfall, the Union Army was straggling back to the city. Stunned and panicked spectators had already returned to report the defeat of Gen. McDowell’s...
Dwight Macdonald
A Rebel in Defense of Tradition is the title of Michael Wreszin’s 1994 biography of Dwight Macdonald (1906- 1982). It is a very good title, by which I mean something more than a “handle”; it is a precise phrase, a summary properly affixed to the memory of an extraordinary man. The emphasis of Wreszin’s biography...
The Conservative Movement Raises the White Flag, Again
Unless you live in a cave, you know that New York’s legislature recently passed a bill recognizing homosexual marriage, a bill that was quickly and enthusiastically signed into law by the latest loathsome member of the Cuomo clan to govern the Empire State. The mainstream conservative movement’s reaction to this event was only slightly...
Can Trump Still Avoid War With Iran?
President Donald Trump does not want war with Iran. America does not want war with Iran. Even the Senate Republicans are advising against military action in response to that attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities. “All of us (should) get together and exchange ideas, respectfully, and come to a consensus–and that should be bipartisan,” says...
Who Are You? The Law of Status
What do veterans, drug users, children, and suspected terrorists have in common? They all have specialized courts to deal with them and their legal issues. Illinois has become the latest state to set up a special “veterans’ court” to handle veterans charged with nonviolent crimes. (New York has had a similar program in place since...
British and American Elections: A Comparative Look
In June 1996, the funding of British politics came to front page prominence with a controversy over the funding of political opposition to greater integration within the European Union. This opposition, organized by Bill Cash, a backbench (i.e., non-office-holding) Tory MP, was offered funds by Sir James Goldsmith, a very wealthy Anglo-French entrepreneur mostly resident...
Virtue-Signalers in a Snit
Hollywood is in a snit. Hollywood is very angry. Hollywood is having a nervous breakdown. The Donald is in the White House, and Hollywood types cannot take it any more. Ditto for the New York Times and the TV networks, except for FOX. Madonna, that aging show-off whose vocabulary consists mainly of the F-word, said...
The Labour Minders
Gordon Brown’s media handlers have taken to ensuring that he frequently appears in front of the country’s journalists while in the company of children. This is presumably intended to soften his public image. However, when a 50-year-old man with a tendency to overdo the stage makeup, who suffers a series of bizarre facial tics and...
Feeling the Effects
Caribbean immigrants in New York City are feeling the effects of several new immigration reform laws. Although New York’s immigration problems are acute—as the rage seen in the Abner Louima torture scandal attests—reform had to come from the federal level, since Mayor Giuliani continues to welcome massive immigration as a boon to the local economy....
Memories and Modernity in Kasbah Country
I first visited Morocco in January 1943 as a young officer affected, with others, to the Casablanca Conference; it was considered sack time, after sterner service in the Western Desert, so called, or Libya. Originally it was to have been between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, but Uncle Joe, as both called the Russian dictator, sulked...
De Gustibus Semper Disputandum Est
I suppose this book might be called a coffee-table book. It has the shape and the lavish illustration of that kind of thing. And I suppose that of its kind, this book isn’t so bad, which is not to say that it’s good. The Sterns’ alphabetical survey of bad taste has the merit of some...
Jackson and the American Indians
Everyone knows that Andrew Jackson wanted American Indians annihilated, defied the Supreme Court in a famous challenge to Chief Justice John Marshall, and forcibly removed the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. What everyone knows is not true. Once a venerated American hero, Andrew Jackson has been attacked...
Affirmative Action in the Arts
Affirmative Action Art is all the rage in California. Recently, the California Arts Council decided that, because of ”social conditions which have historically denied some groups access to the mainstream and . . . complicated patterns of cultural bias,” race-blind awarding procedures were no longer adequate. A new “cultural outreach” was called for with hundreds...
Obama’s Trampling on God’s Turf Now
Yes, Virginia, there is a religious war going on. It is for the soul of America. And traditional Christianity is besieged. In a January visit to the Vatican, American bishops were warned by Benedict XVI that
What the Editors Are Reading
How is it possible to describe Dostoevsky’s great but sometimes neglected novel, Notes From Underground, without provoking repugnance for the nameless anti- hero whose voice dominates its pages? He is, as he announces in the opening lines, “a sick man…a spiteful man,” yet for all his insight into the nature of his own malady, he...
Letter From Egypt: The Ongoing Plight of Christians
For the majority of Egypt’s Christians, the Sisi government is far from ideal, but preferable to any likely alternative. The Copts (“Copt” being derived from the Greek Αἰγύπτιος, “Egyptian”) still suffer from various forms of discrimination, but at least Christians are not formally reduced to the status of dhimmis, second-class citizens under Sharia, which was...
Books in Brief
In 1935, as president of France, Pierre Laval banned “weapons of war” and decreed that all firearms should be registered with the government. In 1945 he was tried and found guilty of treason for his collaboration with the German occupation. Between those two years, Hitler built his strong war machine, and in 1940 he invaded...
Trumped-Up Document Dump
“Can’t we just drone this guy?” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is reported, by several sources, to have asked in a meeting at the State Department in 2010. The “guy” in question was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and after the stunt he pulled in the early morning hours of October 4, Donald Trump and Hillary...
World Citizens on Main Street
“It’s a small, small world,” or so chirp the marionettes of Michael Eisner’s Disney, the outfit that brought you NHL hockey in Orange County and a free Pocahontas glass with the purchase of a Happy Meal at the McDonald’s in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. In fact it is not a small world, at least for those...
Politics and Power
“A bastard kind of Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-life in it; not dead, chopping barren logic merely.” —Thomas Carlyle Since September 11, 2001, there have been many articles and several books purporting to explain what led up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Intelligence and military analyses,...
Letter From New York City: Crime Stories
According to former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, New York City is safer than it has been in years. And if you believe that, I’ve got a great deal for you, on a slightly used bridge. Last December, the NYPD announced that violent felonies had dropped 17.2 percent for the previous 12 months, their...
The Sexual Left, the Welfare State, and the Divorce Revolution
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices. Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been...
Derek Chauvin: The Great White Defendant
In the brilliant novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” author Tom Wolfe describes what he calls the intense media interest in covering “The Great White Defendant.” A review of “Bonfire” explains: The overarching theme of the book is the search for the great white defendant. The vast majority of defendants in New York City are...
The Reluctant Candidate
As a conservative undergraduate student during the early 1960’s, I spent many a long night engaged in animated political argument with a close friend whose supercharged IQ was exceeded only by his condescending manner. The fellow never tired of reminding me that, yes, there were a few responsible Republican public officials. He would always tick...
Books in Brief
Digital Is Destroying Everything, by Andrew V. Edwards (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 232 pp., $34.00). Edwards, a digital-marketing executive, states at the beginning of this book that it was not his intention to write “a rant against all things digital.” Nevertheless, his evaluation of what the digital revolution has wrought comes closer to an...
Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan: Similarities and Differences
I knew the real Ronald Reagan. In 1976, I was a single mother and young politician who risked everything to support him against Gerald Ford, a sitting Republican president. Four years later I helped deliver the key state of Pennsylvania to President Reagan, then I served beside him in the White House and as one...
Conned Again
If the change that President-elect Obama has promised includes a halt to America’s wars of aggression and an end to the rip-off of taxpayers by powerful financial interests, what explains Obama’s choice of foreign and economic policy advisors? Indeed, Obama’s selection of Rahm Israel Emanuel as White House chief of staff is a signal that...
Immer Drummer
Just when I was beginning to think the neoconservatives had reached the nadir of ignorance with people like Jonah Goldberg and David Frum, along comes Harvard grad Bill Kristol to flaunt his ignorance. Bill was so thrilled that someone had put up these mock lyrics to a Harvard Fight song: Illegitimum non carborundum that...
Taking a Stand in Warsaw
With a monument to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising as his backdrop, President Trump delivered a forceful speech on the eve of the G20 Summit, sounding themes that would not be welcome by most other leaders of the world’s most economically powerful countries. Trump identified “the fundamental question of our time” as whether “the West has...
Life in a Border Town
The archetypical middle-sized town in the middle of the Middle West, Rockford seems about as far removed from the border as you can get, unless we count the border with Wisconsin, a few miles to the north. And yet, Rockford has been subject to successive waves of immigration that have brought with them (if in...
Joe Biden’s Bid to Remake America
If Joe Biden’s American Jobs Program, outlined in Pittsburgh, is enacted, then the federal government will take a great leap forward toward irreversible control of the destiny of the Republic. To finance this leap, to subsidize this giant stride toward socialism, U.S. corporations are to be forced to turn over to the government a far...
What is History? Part 34
Never trust a man who reads only one book. —Arturo Perez-Reverte . . . the monarchy had become an insatiable machine for devouring taxes, while a drained populace received nothing in exchange but the political blunders and the disasters of war. —Perez-Reverte In a sense the American Civil War is a belated chapter of the...
Whose Modernity?
When Pat Buchanan’s new book, The Great Betrayal, appeared in April, the hysteria that greeted it was entirely predictable. Not only does Mr, Buchanan challenge the free trade orthodoxy that is dominant among economists and policymakers in both political parties, but he also makes clear that the economic nationalism he champions is only a part...
The Real Clarence Thomas
Bitter attacks, tenacious defenses, and great promotion—not to speak of the best TV in a generation—have made David Brock’s book on The Real Anita Hill a best-seller. As Brock admits, he proves neither Clarence Thomas’s innocence nor Anita Hill’s perfidy. But by scouring the transcript of the Senate hearings, he does show that Hill’s reputation...
The Perfect Storm
The best-seller The Perfect Storm tells a true story of a ship caught in a vortex created by a continental low-pressure system, a tropical hurricane, and an arctic cold front off the shores of Newfoundland. This complex disaster comes to mind when trying to describe the nature of the crisis that nearly closed down the...
On the Draft
I was pleased to read Greg Kaza’s review of the fruitless campaign to end draft registration (“Uncle Sam Still Wants You,” Vital Signs, January). I remember well why Ronald Reagan reneged on his firm promise to end draft registration: Alexander Haig convinced him that Brezhnev’s tanks would be stopped before Warsaw only by the terrifying...
Call Me Simple . . . (2)
But I don't understand: How all those “experts” who are always mouthing off in the media and who are not really experts manage to get on the air. Why people can’t tell the difference between speculation and investment. Why sports are not as much fun as they used to be and seem ...
Purposeful Forgetfulness
Students and teachers silently gawked up at a television screen showing smoke billowing wildly out of the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers. A woman held her hand over her mouth, eyes wide and filling with tears as a look of horror overtook her face. I was in a middle school classroom then, but it...