Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell. Police have three suspects, two black and one white. The latter said they were bored and decided to shoot Lane for “the fun of it.” As...
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The Real Target of Public Schools
Last school year, my son—who was a fourth grader at a public school— came home with a red piece of paper entitled “Family Call to Action.” The letter on the front, preprinted by a corporation but signed by his teacher, informed me that my son would be joining the Target Stores and Hanes Corporation “Kids...
Are the Democrats Bent on Suicide?
After reading an especially radical platform agreed upon by the British Labor Party, one Tory wag described it as “the longest suicide note in history.” The phrase comes to mind on reading of the resolution calling for a Green New Deal, advanced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and endorsed by at least five of the major Democratic...
Night Vision
“I hear thunder,” Ivalene said in a puzzled voice, looking up to the blue sky stretched tight across the great canyon. “How could there be thunder?” Will Ford demanded. “There isn’t a cloud in sight. They must be blasting somewhere close by to here.” “So how could they be blasting, smart-ass?” she retorted. “Blasting isn’t...
Unfit for Command
Observing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Democratic House imperil a U.S.-Turkish alliance of 60 years—by formally charging Turkey with genocide in a 1915 massacre of the Armenians—the question comes to mind: Does this generation have the maturity to lead America? About the horrors visited on Armenians in 1915, that year of Turkish triumph over the...
Death in Oklahoma
Earlier this week, Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player, was brutally killed in Duncan, Oklahoma. Police have charged James Edwards and Chancey Luna with first degree murder for killing Lane. Lane was white; Edwards and Luna are black, though an accomplice, Michael Jones, charged with being an accessory after the fact, is white. Australian papers...
Of Rats and Men
There are people, in all likelihood a majority, who are by nature obedient. Their lot is to play Sid Sawyer to whatever Aunt Polly comes along, whether the authority in question is a democratically elected leader or an up-to-his-elbows-in-blood dictator. As though stuck in some epochal centrifuge, they go with the flow, tirelessly, unwaveringly, always...
What’s in a Naomi?
'Doppelganger' centers around Naomi Klein's personal grievance: Being mistaken for Naomi Wolf.
No One Is Buying It
The lies on display at the Democratic National Convention are too bold to believe.
Gardasil Rick
Texas Gov. Rick Perry enjoyed one month as the heartthrob of the Republican Party. He announced his presidential bid on August 13, overshadowing Rep. Michele Bachmann’s narrow victory over Rep. Ron Paul in the Ames Straw Poll. By September 15, a Bloomberg National Poll showed him leading former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Eastern establishment...
ISIS: Trump’s Unheralded Success
Considering the unprecedented obstacles President Trump is facing from various quarters in his attempts to devise a coherent foreign policy strategy (see my column in the September issue of Chronicles), the apparent success of his anti-ISIS approach thus far is both surprising and encouraging. It shows that realist pragmatism yields results. Over the past six...
Let’s Go Poland
Conversations with those who have traveled throughout the Eastern Bloc reveal that group tours, not solo travel, are the rule rather than the exception. For a hefty fee, vacation moguls will relieve the prospective tourist of three major brain drains: consular relations (visas), hotel accommodations, and transportation. Group tour-guides will provide the serious history enthusiast...
A Trip Back to the Fifties
Please hop into my time machine, and I’ll give you a short tour of Boonville, North Carolina in the summer of 1959, before bringing you back to the present day. Strolling around this small hamlet of 600, note the town’s most historic building, the old brick bank founded long ago by Mr. Shore. Take in...
Are Conservatives Fair Game?
Should members of the political right criticize one another for their faults, or band together out of solidarity against the left? Is it fair to consider a conservative public figure’s personal life when judging his moral pronouncements? I attempt to answer these questions in response to a critic.
South Africa
Everybody knows somewhere inside him that South Africa, since 1984, and really for a generation, has been a set piece in the bloody farce we call “revolution.” The one-sidedness of the farce betrays our unacknowledged unease: except for a classic article in Commentary by Paul Johnson and a few other pieces, not a word has...
Superior Fiction
One of the pleasures of fiction is the opportunity that novels, short stories, and epic poems give us to escape from our own everyday world into an alien world of gods and heroes (as in the Iliad) or knights and wizards (Tennyson’s Idylls), English villagers (in Hardy’s Wessex), or Mississippi rednecks and redskins (of Faulkner’s...
Responding to Obscenities
I am not Charlie, nor will I ever be. Wearing a Je suis Charlie badge is one sure way of getting attention, but I will leave that to others. And another thing: Obscenity has no redeeming social value, and Charlie Hebdo was and is one long obscenity. But let’s start with that famous Parisian march...
Populists Are Right to Be Paranoid
We are living in a political culture in which anyone identified with the now-vaguely-defined “right” can lose his fortune, reputation, and possibly his freedom. Meanwhile, the racist, vandalizing left can do what it wants with total impunity. A professor lecturing at the Yale School of Medicine dreamt aloud about “shooting white people,” and has not suffered...
Raiching the Constitution Over the Coals
The Supreme Court is often described as the final redoubt of states’ rights. In the last decade, we have heard much about the Court’s “New Federalism” jurisprudence. The Court, we have been warned, is seeking to return the Constitution to the horse-and-buggy days of yesteryear. Legal oracles such as the New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse...
Abridging Omar
Attorney General Loretta Lynch attempted to censor the three 911 calls Omar Mateen made as he was slaughtering his 49 victims at an Orlando nightclub. All references to Islam and the Islamic State—to which he pledged allegiance as he was slaughtering his victims—were initially scrubbed. “What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this...
On Russia
I agree with Professor W. Bruce Lincoln (“The Burden of Russian History,” March 1994) that Russia’s economic and political system is prone to break society into two parts: “them,” those responsible for making decisions and managing the country, and “us,” the simple people deadly indifferent to everything that doesn’t touch them immediately—i.e., high politics. I...
Putin’s Surrender of Kherson May Spell His Doom
Putin's abandonment of Kherson, the only regional center that Russia managed to capture in over eight months, was an unforced error that will erode his ability to stay in power.
Hollywood Blues
“A fact is not a truth until you love it.” —Shelby Foote A while back, I wrote a piece for a Festschrift in honor of Walter Sullivan—Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations. My piece, “Places We Have Come From, Places We Have Been,” argued that my own fiction and poetry, like that of so many...
On ‘Governor John Engler’
Although Greg Kaza has political pretenses [sic], a recent article in Chronicles (Cultural Revolutions, June 1992) suggests that he has not learned even the most elementary lessons of American politics-least of which that it is “the art of the possible.” The problem with Kaza is that he is an ideologue. Like most ideologues, he would...
No More Girls in Bikinis
Just after the Berlin wall came down, I flew to Berlin with my German-Austrian wife and traveled around the city and its eastern parts. On visiting the Olympic stadium I told the taxi driver that my ...
Books in Brief: The Forgotten Slave Trade
The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam, by Simon Webb (Pen and Sword History; 208 pp., $39.95). In America, public discussion about slavery—when it doesn’t devolve into BLM activists burning cities or congressmen bending the knee—is premised on important but erroneous assumptions: only blacks have been enslaved; black slavery was racially motivated; discussion...
Figuring Out Your 1960s Stance in One Question
The 1960s, according to Carl Oglesby, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, “will never level out.” “It’s a corkscrew, it’s a tailspin, it’s a joyride on a roller coaster, it’s a never-ending mystery,” he continues. “Who won? Who lost? What were the terms of victory and defeat? We’ll always be discussing that.” I...
Polish-German Reconciliation in an Historic Town
On August 29, 2004, just before my departure from Poland, I attended an important ceremony at the small, historic town of Nieszawa, which lies near the Vistula River, about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, in the Kujawy-Pomorze (Kuyavia-Pomerania) region or Voivodeship (Wojewodztwo). It was a sunny and rather hot day. The town, which currently has...
A Sellout of Our Unemployed
By the choices we make we define ourselves. We reveal our biases and beliefs. And so, too, do our institutions. In writing the $789 billion stimulus bill, Congress revealed that, for all its
What the Editors Are Reading
Everyone to Bernie Sanders’ right gasped in 1994 when radical British historian Eric Hobsbawm argued that Communist regimes who murdered millions “would still have been worth backing” had there been a “chance of a new world being born in great suffering.” The diabolically deranged never connect maniacal theory to deadly results. We can’t psychoanalyze Hobsbawm, who...
History Is Catching Up
“Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.” —Martin H. Fischer In March 1989, four young men in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lured a retarded 17-year-old girl into a basement playroom, where they proceeded to rape her, penetrate her with a baseball bat and a broom handle, and generally brutalize...
Martin Luther King, Jr., as Conservative Hero
In Campus, a newsletter of the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a letter last spring from a student subscriber questioned comments about Martin Luther King found in the preceding issue’s feature essay, “A Rage for Merit.” This article portrayed King as a passionate critic of affirmative action, and this, according to the student, does not square...
A New Church and a New Country
Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles tirelessly advocates for illegal aliens. A native of Mexico, he has an ardent love of his homeland and his people. He testifies frequently on Capitol Hill in favor of various amnesty-related issues, always in the name of the Catholic Church. He promotes the same theme before various groups of...
New Writing From the Northwest
“Every kind of writing is good save that which bores.” —Voltaire The Pacific Northwest of the United States, embracing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and western Montana, has long been a major source of agricultural and mineral wealth. For generations it has also served as a center for the fine arts, but only recently has it done...
Health Care Debate—At Last
A new Associated Press-GfK poll that shows Americans evenly divided on the Obamacare repeal is getting big play as the House opens debate on precisely that course of action. Won’t it be amazing to hear Democrats argue—in view of this spectacular turn in public opinion—that House Republicans should now back off? Nope. To Obamacare’s...
Passion in Private
Over the last ten years, A.N. Wilson has been compared to the great 20th-century English satirists: Waugh, Amis, and Barbara Pym. Now that he is in the process of writing a trilogy, it was inevitable that some critic would add to these the name of Anthony Powell. Of course, publishers like to compare the work...
The Bankruptcy Crisis
Personal bankruptcies are being filed at a rate 25 percent higher than in 1995, and if the current rate is maintained, the absolute numbers, estimated at 1.1 million, will surpass the record of 900,000 set in 1992. The situation surprised the New York Times (August 26, 1996) because normally high bankruptcy rates occur during recessions....
What the Editors are Reading: The Canterbury Tales
Before William Shakespeare there was Geoffrey Chaucer. The Bard borrowed at least one of his plots from his predecessor (“The Two Noble Kinsmen,” was based on the “Knight’s Tale”). Both English greats were, it could be said, refashioning Homer’s Shield of Achilles as they painted elaborate portraits of their entire societies, from the lowliest corners to...
War Party Targets Putin and Assad
Having established a base on the Syrian coast, Vladimir Putin last week began air strikes on ISIS and other rebel forces seeking to overthrow Bashar Assad. A longtime ally of Syria, Russia wants to preserve its toehold on the Mediterranean, help Assad repel the threat, and keep the Islamic terrorists out of Damascus. Russia is...
Brief Mentions: The Sixties
The disappointing qualities of this final volume of Edmund Wilson’s diaries, due partially to surfeit (over 2,000 pages of The Twenties, The Thirties, The Forties, and The Fifties precede these almost 1,000), have finally to do with the limitations of the modern secular intellectual mind as it wrestles with the perceived insufficiency, tawdriness, and dishonesty...
Modernists Amuck
The Tree of Life Produced by Cottonwood Pictures and River Road Entertainment Written and directed by Terrence Malick Distributed by Fox Searchlight Entertainment Midnight in Paris Produced by Letty Aronson Written and directed by Woody Allen Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Evelyn Waugh once remarked that, while reading Ulysses, one could watch James Joyce...
Bond and Betrayal
Goldeneye Produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein Released by United Artists In the best of the James Bond films derived directly from the novels of Ian Fleming—Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball—Sean Connery was able to evoke the gentlemanly,...
His Truth Is Marching On
Like most “whose hearts pump Confederate blood,” Chilton Williamson, Jr., in lamenting the failure of Dixie’s attempt at secession (“The Revenge of the Confederacy,” What’s Wrong With the World, January), neglects to address the elephant in the bed. That critter is, of course, slavery, the “peculiar institution” at the core of what Williamson sees as...
Sarkozy the Demagogue
President Nicolas Sarkozy announced March 30 that French police have arrested 19 persons suspected of belonging to violent Muslim networks. “These arrests are linked to the world of a certain sort of radical Islamism,” Sarkozy told Europe 1 Radio, and added that automatic weapons were found in the homes of some of those arrested in the...
American “Stormtroopers”
With the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse under nightly siege from violent radicals, and Portland’s police hard-pressed to protect it, President Trump sent in federal agents to secure the building. The reaction from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “The use of stormtroopers under the guise of law and order is a tactic that is...
Sleepwalking in the Nanny State
In Purchasing Submission, legal expert Philip Hamburger documents the power of the federal government to control and coerce by the granting and withholding of federal funds.
A Forgotten Document
A few months after the close of the American Civil War there was a brief but intense and interesting correspondence between Lord Acton, the European historian of liberty, and General R.E. Lee, hero of the defeated Confederacy, on the issues of the war. In the course of this correspondence Acton commented that Appomattox had been...
Lilliput vs. Leviathan
There are lots of freckles, red hair, and Celtic names in Catron County, New Mexico. Though almost everyone in the county has some Indian or Mexican blood, this is home to the families and culture which David Hackett Fischer describes in Albion’s Seed as Scotch-Irish, double distilled, first by the Highland clearances and then by...
Letters From Rome: Italy’s Russiagate-Wannabe
Back in the Eternal City after three years, and there is another political scandal on the horizon. Or at least the local media machine (every bit as bad as its U.S. equivalent) would have us believe there was. The target: Matteo Salvini, Italy’s famously Euroskeptic interior minister. The accusation: corrupt dealings between his Lega party...
In Search of the New American Man
The evident purpose of Taming the Prince is to provide a respectable philosophical pedigree for the usurpations and abuses of power by American Presidents since FDR. (Professor Mansfield dedicates the book to his father, “constant advocate of a strong presidency from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.”) Where conservatives such as Corwin, Kendall, Burnham, and Samuel...