As everyone who has not been in total coronavirus quarantine knows, Harvey Weinstein was recently condemned to death for sexually assaulting six Hollywood wannabes. Actually, he was given 23 years in prison, but in view of his 67 years of age, it would have been far more dramatic and fitting for the former Hollywood film...
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...
Confined to a three-man tent on a rainy day in the canyons of southeastern Utah, I continued by lantern light my rereading of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses, first published a quarter-century ago as the first volume in The Border Trilogy, and got a good start on its immediate sequel, The Crossing. McCarthy’s...
Two years and three months after President Bush announced the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq, the war is far from over. Large areas of the country are affected by an open-ended guerrilla insurgency. Periods of intense violence are followed by brief and temporary lulls. Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on May 31 that...
The nasty fight between Richard Clarke and manifold Bush officials quickly took on a “he said/she said” quality as greater violence enveloped Iraq. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice gave a strong performance before the September 11 Commission, but the celebrated August 2001 briefing memo warning of an Al Qaeda attack weakened her case. Neither side...
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...
While a long parade of executives has exchanged tailored pinstripes for orange jumpsuits, an even more deserving group of miscreants have thus far eluded their just deserts—those executives’ Wall Street overlords, who wrote the script for the latest and greatest of bull markets, directed the hucksters, and set their standards. The excesses of the bull...
For a political party that celebrates diversity, it is certainly an odd choice. The Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party of Minnesota, like the Democrats nationwide, has celebrated its role in promoting multiculturalism and massive immigration. Yet the ticket the DFL has nominated to run for governor and lieutenant governor this fall—State Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe and...
Coelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt was Horace’s observation on the narrowing effects of travel: “Those who go across the sea change their weather but not their mind.” It is the rare tourist who gets more out of his expeditions than a confirmation of his prejudices. One of the most intelligent visitors to...
President Obama is in a dilemma from which there appears to be no easy or early escape. Democrats are the Party of Government. They feed it, and it feeds them. The larger government grows, the more agencies that are created, the more bureaucrats who are hired, the more people who become beneficiaries, the more deeply...
“We are Cavaliers,” novelist William Caruthers boasted, “that generous, fox-hunting, winedrinking, dueling and reckless race of men which gives so distinct a character to Virginians wherever they may be found.” If we look closely at the Cavalier, will we find the quintessential Virginian? “Cavalier” was originally an English term signifying political affiliation, not social status....
At the Pulse nightclub on June 16, Omar Seddique Mateen, a Muslim on his own personal jihad, opened fire on the crowd of more than 300. No one shot back. Some tried to hide in the bathrooms. One of those in a bathroom texted his mother, “He’s coming. I’m gonna die.” He was right. Mateen...
So too it may be useful to write a novel about the end of the world. Perhaps it is only through the conjuring up of catastrophe, the destruction of all Exxon signs, and the sprouting of vines in the church pews, that the novelist can make vicarious use of catastrophe in order that he...
One year ago, House Republicans were girding their loins to introduce legislation that would amnesty millions of illegal aliens. The “path to citizenship” was reportedly off the table, as GOP leaders, in an effort to please everyone (meaning no one), prepared to veer off onto the “path to legalization,” kicking the can of citizenship down...
Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown knew what he was doing when he dumped Kamala Harris. She’s not up to snuff.
Some 45 years ago, I was sitting in Washington Park, a quiet refuge in downtown Charleston defined by Broad, Meeting, and Chalmers Streets. The park was my favorite place to read and to engage in what was then every young man’s hobby: brooding about girls. Sitting there, I be- came aware of an annoying presence—...
When John Hinckley was acquitted in 1982 for his attempted assassination of the President, the verdict galvanized opposition to the insanity defense. Some lawmakers wanted to restrict the use of the defense or even abolish it altogether. In Crime and Madness Thomas Maeder places the insanity defense and the recent challenges to it in historical...
The migrant crisis is principally a deep concern for Europe, with the United States increasingly affected. Canada now joins the list of nations involved in migration issues. The province of Quebec has just held elections, and the Parti Quebecois has been swept out of sight. The winner is the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ), a populist...
Henry Timrod died in 1867 at the age of 39 from tuberculosis—his end aggravated and hastened by inadequate food and the rigors of eking out a living amidst the charred ruins of South Carolina’s capital city. The newspaper that had provided the only income for himself, his wife, his child, and his widowed sister’s large...
All through the Cold War, the Turks were among America’s most reliable allies. After World War II, when Stalin encroached upon Turkey and Greece, Harry Truman came to the rescue. Turkey reciprocated by sending thousands of troops to fight alongside our GIs in Korea. Turkey joined NATO and let the U.S. station Jupiter missiles in...
Fraud and deception among society’s heroes draw attention to contradictions and inconsistencies in its value systems. Because American culture applauds entrepreneurship, independence, and ambition, for example, scientists have been encouraged to develop independent imaginations and innovative research, to engage in intense competition, to strive for success. Ironically, Americans also want their whitecoated heroes to be...
Until 20 years ago, one could count on Hollywood to produce at least one film every few years dealing with early American history. John Ford gave us Drums Along the Mohawk in the 1940’s, and Disney gave us the Swamp Fox in the 1960’s. Such movies may have given the public only “popular” history (before...
Barack Obama’s re-election, while socially, culturally, and morally disastrous for the country, may prove the lesser of two evils when it comes to foreign policy, according to some pundits. Perhaps, but only because Obama’s primary focus is on irreversibly changing the character and ethnic composition of the United States. Republicans, in the meantime, learn nothing...
A career as a writer offers many thrills as one piece after another gets picked up and published. Today, however, it also offers many nervous chills, as the specter of cancel culture could broadside a writer at any moment. I experienced one of the former thrills of writing when a piece of mine was published...
It is said, and it is very true, that the moment when vice becomes the custom marks the death of a republic, for the dissolute persons cease to be regarded as loathsome, and all baseness becomes normal. —Arturo Perez-Reverte “Hell” ain’t cussin’, it’s geography. —Harry Carey, Jr. in Wagon Master History has the cruel reality of...
After Pearl Harbor, FDR declared that his role of “Dr. New Deal” had been superseded, replaced by his new role, “Dr. Win the War.” Tuesday, President Donald Trump signaled that, in the war on the coronavirus pandemic, he, too, is executing a strategic pivot. Where the medical crisis had been the central front, pulling the...
A substitute teacher in a public school in what is, by today’s standards, still a relatively socially conservative part of the country uses “an anatomical word during a teaching lesson.” She is fired, and the story goes viral. Just another battle in the never-ending culture war, right? Yes—but not in the way you might think....
Since the Maidan coup in 2014, the multitude of Russian speakers in Ukraine are gradually facing more and more political pressure to abandon their mother tongue.
Abraham Lincoln, in his 1860 Cooper Union speech, asked, “What is the frame of government under which we live?” The answer must be, he said, the Constitution of the United States. The answer today, as Chronicles’ reviewer of Quirk’s and Bridewell’s Judicial Dictatorship stated in 1995, is a judicial dictatorship imposed by the Supreme Court. ...
Listening to the racialist left complain about “white privilege” was bad enough before the cops killed hoodlums Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Now, it’s nearly insufferable. Consider three offerings—one from Salon, the second from President and Mrs. Obama and the third, a Twitter feed. Salon’s came from Brittney Cooper, a perpetually enraged black woman who...
By now, most have heard—sometimes with sorrow, sometimes with delight—of the latest fashion in the working-class suburbs of France: setting fire to cars at night. There is a lot more to this than a nocturnal rite for rival juvenile gangs. It is probably exaggerated to forecast a civil war: Two sides are necessary to make...
Tossing around a word like music is problematical—and culture is even harder to deploy meaningfully. Nevertheless, I am going to give both a try in a revealing juxtaposition that was brought to my attention by that world-traveling anthropologist Henry Radetsky, an academic colleague and a valued friend. Henry is a cultured man I have learned...
I only believed myself close to death once on my Holy Year pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi. I had been walking in the sun for seven hours along the ancient footpaths and cart tracks between Gubbio—where the saint tamed the wolf that had been terrorizing the townsfolk—and Valfabbrica, the only village...
When I first saw the memo from the FBI’s counterterrorism center in Newark, declaring that I’m “a threat to National Security,” not to mention an “agent of a foreign power,” I was incredulous. These can’t be real FBI documents, I thought to myself. Someone is pulling my leg. Sadly, no. As I discovered upon further...
Americans stood up yesterday to say they want to govern themselves. Now comes the hard work of doing it.
“A monarchy that’s tempered with republican equality.” Who would have thought, 100 years ago, that by the end of the American Century the great burning public issue would be the Confederate flag? Back in 1900, Americans were eager to put their quarrels behind them. Rebs and Yanks had fought side by side in Cuba, and...
In 1976, when the separatist Parti Québécois (PQ) won the majority of seats in Quebec’s National Assembly, giving it control of the provincial government, many thought that the party’s goal was to save French culture and the French language in Canada. It is, however, much more complicated than that. The PQ was founded in 1967...
During the Republican presidential debate on May 15, Ron Paul, the constitutionalist from Texas, flatly stated that the terrorist attacks on September 11 were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani shot back a mendacious rejoinder: “That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that...
For this issue of Chronicles we have assembled the thing in and of itself, examples of Southern literature as it is here and now, a couple of appropriate poems and a work of fiction by one of the South’s finest writers, together with some good talk about contemporary letters in the South. I would rather...
The Eternal City is home to many eternal things—or, rather, their representatives, among them St. Peter’s, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Capitoline Hill, and the Forum. Nevertheless, on recent travels to Rome, my wife’s and my first visit has been to none of these things, but, instead, to our good friends Asha and Bellamy, who reside...
The putative Democratic nominee for president is a child of the 1965 immigration wave that put on trial everything about the America that came before it.
In Legacy of Violence, Caroline Elkins projects her skewed view of 1950s Kenya onto the entire history of the British Empire.
Can reviewer Ralph Berry find nothing in the public life of Winston Churchill that was negative, or was there nothing of that nature in Andrew Robert’s new book: Churchill: Walking with Destiny? Was Churchill’s reputed collaboration with Foreign Secretary Edward Gray [sic] to effect a partial mobilization of the Army, prior to Britain’s decision to...
Seeking relief from the midterm madness, I’ve been rereading H.L. Mencken’s political reportage and commentary, selections from which have been published in most Mencken anthologies. Up to Franklin Roosevelt’s bid for a second presidential term, American politics was still enjoyable—bitter though many campaigns in the 19th century were, especially as the War Between the States...
On October 5, 2000, in an almost bloodless coup by the security forces staged against the backdrop of massive street protests, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Serbia. Ten years later, many of those who cheered his downfall then (this author included) have nothing to celebrate. In the run-up to “Peti oktobar” they...
Casino Royale Produced by Barbara Broccoli, Andrew Noakes, and Anthony Waye Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis Based on the novel by Ian Fleming Released by Columbia Pictures It is with great trepidation and some sadness that I must announce that James Bond is dead. Granted, there is...
Talking recently to a Polish friend who has lived in both Canada and the United States, trying to explain the vitality of my countrymen to him, I said finally, “Unless you’re an American, you don’t know what being alive is!” To which he gloomily replied, “And no one knows what death is till he moves...
Greetings from New York, where a new hate crime is taking shape: It is called “place-ism,” and it will be defined in the criminal code as the belief that a particular place, be it a neighborhood, village, city, or state, is superior to any other place, and that the residents of this place have a...
Early in Owen Wister’s 1905 novel Lady Baltimore, the narrator, recently arrived in Charleston from Philadelphia, remarks upon the stillness of the city, its “silent verandas” and cloistered gardens behind their wrought iron gates—“this little city of oblivion . . . with its lavender and pressed shut memories . . . ” For Wister the...
Herbert Marcuse saw the transformation of the culture as the sine qua non of revolutionary change. He understood that the working classes of Europe and America wanted better wages, not the radical destruction of the western way of life.