As this is written, the annual Council of the Church of Sweden is meeting here, proceedings which will last to the end of the month of August. As the name implies, Sweden has a state church which is Lutheran in confession. Its origin, like that of the Church of England, was based on the whim of a king. In the...
Striking Back
Fathers are striking back in the cultural war over abortion. As a slogan, “abortion rights” has translated into the woman’s absolute prerogative to abort her unborn child. It is not only the interests of the child that are brutally crushed by this “right”; the desires of fathers—even married fathers—have also been brushed aside as irrelevant in abortion decisions. But this...
A Bizarre Psychotic
Laurie Dann, a bizarre psychotic who sent poisoned food to acquaintances and former employers and once stabbed her husband with an ice pick, shot up a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Illinois, murdering one child and wounding several others before killing herself. To people in the community, it should have been (and was) a source of grief and outrage. To everyone...
First Mass Mailing
“Understanding AIDS,” the U.S. Surgeon General’s brochure on “public enemy number one,” has been called the first mass mailing of a federal policy message to every American household. In fact, an earlier administration attempted to meet a very different public danger—nuclear attack—with a similar mail campaign. Comparison of the social assumptions found in each document offers an unsettling portrait of...
Art as Politics: Rebecca West’s Unpleasant Mirror
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” —Edmund Burke There is a photograph of Rebecca West taken shortly before her death: she sits in a throne-like armchair looking slightly off camera. One of her hands rests on the carved handle, the other is in her lap. Her hair is respectably gray and...
In Defense of Conspicuous Consumption
After my March letter, “Three Days in Sodom, Two in Gomorrah,” readers of this magazine have written to ask why I am so down on conspicuous consumption. I want to go on record here: I am not. But even a gourmand should disapprove of gluttony, since pleasure exists only insofar as it is subject to will. If you think about...
The War Toys Meltdown
At Circus World, Mattel’s Rattlor, a Masters of the Universe character, glares at his potential purchasers. “Sounds fearsome battle rattle before attacking,” the package advertises. The action figure is an “evil snake man creature with the quick strike head.” Price: $3.98. LJN Toys, Ltd., on the other hand, offers Thundercats Berserkers Hammerhand, which comes complete with operating instructions: “Squeeze the...
Recovering the Medieval Family
Hatred of the past ill becomes a historian. Yet it is hard not to detect this disfiguring animus—paired with an overweening love of contemporaneity—in the works of many modern historians of family life. In recent decades, men such as Philippe Aries, Edward Shorter, and Lloyd DeMause have alleged—on the basis of scanty evidence—that in premodern Europe, marriage was strictly an...
Decency Through Strength
“Ideas rule the world and its events. A revolution is a passage of an idea from theory to practice. Whatever men say, material interests never have caused and never will cause a revolution.” —Mazzini My grandmother, the daughter of a Confederate “high private,” always said that if someone had done something particularly good, you could be sure he had Southern...
Stardust
“Not till the fire is dying in the grate / Look we for any kinship with the stars.” —Meredith The post-World War I shattered visions of Pound and Eliot are perhaps fundamentally less different from the incoherencies of Kerouac and Corso, the randomly referential allegory of Ashbery, or the associative anarchy of Bly and Merwin than we have been taught....
Homosexuality and the Family
For nearly two decades, homosexuals and their sympathizers have increased their efforts to persuade opinion leaders, educators, clergy, government officials, and the public that their sexual lives, though different, are as normal and natural as the heterosexuals’. Since some heterosexuals also engage in sodomy, the homosexuals have claimed that it is only their same-sex orientation that sets them apart from...
Among the Lakes
My advice to anyone who wants to see some of the most polite people around is to get to Chile soon—before we declare war on it or the media level it into the likeness of a London suburb, with a bust of Lenin in every town hall, tax-funded homes for lesbians, and a veto on golliwog dolls. My wife, Colleen,...
Prophet of the Left
I first met my future colleague Raymond Williams in 1959, when I was a young lecturer in English literature at Cambridge and he still a tutor in adult education in Oxford. His best-known book. Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), had just appeared—a late-Marxist interpretation of English intellectual life since the French Revolution—and what I principally remember from that first encounter...
Learning Goodness
If is ironic that the thoughts of this essay, extracted from a commencement address I gave at Claremont McKenna College in the spring of 1987, celebrate an old Stanford University tradition of submerging all students in the classical thought of the West as a precondition to graduation, no matter what their major. This spring of 1988, the Stanford University administration...
The Genuine Article
Linda Hasselstrom is a friend of mine, although we don’t write often or know each other well. I visited her South Dakota ranch, between the Black HOls and the Badlands, only once, six years ago, at which time I had the unwitting bad manners to ask her how much land she owned. It was an adventure I’ll always remember warmly,...
Barbara Pym’s Unsentimental Eye
Admirers of Barbara Pym have several regrets. The greatest is that there aren’t more of her novels. Pym would undoubtedly have written more had she lived longer, for her death in 1980 occurred at a time of renewed productivity. She certainly would have written more had she not suffered 14 years of publishers’ rejections. Pym’s novels have a flavor all...
Still Crazy After All These Years
After the 1987 convention of the National Organization for Women, USA Today published the results of an “informal survey” of 703 NOW members. Forty-seven percent of the respondents said that “women are doing worse in 1987 than in 1980.” Twenty-four percent said “women are doing better.” Half the members questioned believed that “NOW should focus more on family and child-care...
A Hatchery at The Nation
If Eleanor Roosevelt was the self-appointed godmother of post-New Deal liberalism, then Freda Kirchwey was its unelected recording (and traveling) secretary. Each woman understood her role and memorized her lines before assuming her part in her long and stormy run on the political stage. In preparation for her grand entrance each woman took a good hard look at the man’s...
Jesse, I Hardly Knew Ye
Some of us down here took exception a while back when John Aldridge referred to Jimmy Carter as “a redneck peanut farmer from Georgia.” We felt it was a gross libel on rednecks. Of course, Aldridge didn’t mean to be complimentary. Calling our former President that was about as malicious, as offensive, and as beside the point as calling Jesse...
Candy Store Dreams
Boyhood was once a distinct and definable stage in the life cycle of the American male. It was also by the standards of today almost unbelievably innocent. At least it was in the small Midwestern city where I grew up just before the Depression. There was no available sex or television. Drugs were unknown; racial conflict did not exist (if...
In Praise of Toughness
“A system-grinder hates the truth.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson During the 25 years of its existence, contemporary feminism has received a measure of gentle chiding for its excesses. Not even the most indulgent eye can completely overtook feminist comparisons of marriage to prostitution, childbirth to defecation, or the use of the pronoun “he” to Jim Crow. Yet few cultural critics have...
Washing Onto the Pages
A new word, “hazing,” has washed onto the pages of the Soviet press with the wave of glasnost. It denotes the harassment, oppression, and humiliation suffered by new conscripts, “greenhorns,” at the hands of “grandfathers”—the Soviet term for soldiers who are nearing the end of their conscription term. The subject was broached by Yuri Polyakov in his story “A Hundred...
The Vanishing Adult
In Fatal Attraction (1987), a woman jilted by her one-night stand strikes back: she leaves his six-year-old daughter’s rabbit boiling on the stove, pours sulfuric acid on his car, harasses him with vitriolic and abusive cassettes, stages an aggressive suicide, makes anonymous phone calls to his wife, kidnaps his daughter, and, half-crazed, stalks his wife with a butcher knife. She...
Sexual Habits
In writing of sensual pleasures, Thomas Hobbes observed that “the greatest” is “that by which we are invited to give continuance to our species, and the next by which a man is invited to meat, for the preservation of his individual person.” From more than one perspective, Hobbes had his priorities straight. Parents, on more than one occasion, have given...
Emily and The Feminists
The centennial marking the death of the poet Emily Dickinson, on May 15, 1886, slipped quietly by a couple of years ago without noticeable effect on the national consciousness. The media in general, from the Sunday supplements to the guardians of culture on PBS television, were not, on the whole, visibly impressed. It was an anniversary which ought to have...
Sex and the Clergy
Sex and the clergy have never made a good combination, and when the nation’s Catholic bishops wrote a draft letter on the status of women, we could just about predict the outcome. The time has passed when clergymen shepherded flocks or attended to questions of the eternal. Men of the cloth now keep busy scrambling to keep up with the...
Causley at 70
My formal association with Chronicles began in February 1986, when, at the suggestion of its editor, I wrote an obituary of Philip Larkin. Looking back at the history of my loves, I explained that I had decided to buy and edit The Yale Literary Magazine because “my ambition in life was to find the poet born to translate Rilke into...
A Party Without Guests
At the last American Political Scientists Association (APSA) convention in Chicago (September 3-6, 1987), I was immediately struck, and happily so, by the unusual attention given to historical matters. This certainly was a reflection of the convention’s theme that was a response to last year’s bicentennial celebration of the national Constitution. Nevertheless, there were two aspects of this new historical...
The Great Deception
It’s only too easy to be cynical about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, and particularly about the excess and emptiness it stands for. While lavish money and attention have been spent on all aspects of this $8.5 million production—in ways that are guaranteed to impress the child in every adult—its packagers forgot the one ingredient that some theatergoers...
Electric Logocentricity
In the beginning was the Word. Not verbum, the written word, thought Erasmus, but sermo, the spoken word. Whatever its validity for understanding St. John’s Gospel, literature that matters seems to split along the lines of that dichotomy. There are exciting and important books that dance on the page, wheeling and turning at the command of a master drill sergeant,...
Tyranny and Sloth
When I say that I thank you for asking me here to speak to you, that I thank you I am here, I have to confess that I am flying in the face of the latest status ritual practiced by many of my colleagues in the scribbling professions. The latest thing, as you may already have learned (I am a...
Forty-Niners: Marx, Engels, and Harrod’s
The other day, in London, I had a vision on a moving staircase in Harrod’s. Harrod’s is a department store in the British capital much loved by local duchesses and well-heeled visiting Americans—a sort of consumer-heaven with chic, from its delicatessen to its china and its sumptuous furnishings. It is less noted for its mystical experiences, which is why I...
Rewriting History
Cry Freedom, the Richard Attenborough film, is yet another attempt to rewrite recent history using a prism of liberal shibboleths and the civil rights experience in the United States from which to make judgments. The film is based on the so-called friendship between Bantu leader Steve Biko, the black consciousness proponent, and Donald Woods, a white liberal newspaper reporter, and...
The Religion of Neoconservatism
Did you ever wonder why Jewish neoconservative thinkers never argue “from” Judaism, in the way in which Michael Novak argues from Roman Catholicism, and Richard Neuhaus argues from Lutheran Christianity? That is to say, Judaism never forms a point of departure and never defines a court of appeal. For the Jewish neoconservatives Judaism simply does not exist. They do not...
For God, Country, and Kate Smith
To that select few who have frequented its precincts, it is simply “The Major’s.” In reality it’s the “Globe and Laurel,” along Virginia’s Route One near the main gate to the U.S. Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia. Its proprietor is a sandy haired, crewcut, toothbrush-mustached, immaculately turned out, retired Major of the U.S. Marine Corps: one Rick Spooner. A lionhearted...
And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day
Deborah Epstein Popper is a graduate student in geography at Rutgers University, and Frank J. Popper chairs the university’s urban studies department there: in New Brunswick, New Jersey, about as far away from the Great Plains, in every way, as you can get. The Poppers published a long article in the December 1987 issue of Planning (American Planning Association). The...
Dealhead of the Century
“Hey, if you hit the ball right, it goes. What can I tell you.” —Lenny Dykstra, author and New York Mets outfielder Six years ago my husband added action to an idea and started his own business. Today his company has 130 employees and $13 million in sales. At 13 million, we are not exactly swimming with the big fish...
George Garrett Talks
This interview took place on September 18 and 19, 1985, at Garrett’s house in Charlottesville, not far from the University of Virginia. It is a sizable stone house, rented, with most of the available wall space covered with hastily erected brick-and-board bookcases. Not quite settled yet, Garrett and his wife, Susan, joked about how they were still living like graduate...
Bribemasters
‘The devil’s boots don’t creak.’ —Scottish proverb Many who take money from him, attend his conferences, or publish their articles in his publications will point to his anti-Communism. Others support the civil liberty issues he seems to embody. Some reassure themselves by seeing the influential people with whom he travels. A few employ the rationale of the lesser evil: the...
An Unpeaceable Kingdom
It was one of those Saturday nights that spills over into Sunday morning. Invited into the home of a main-line Protestant couple in split-level northern New Jersey, the 40ish group was made up of Jews and Roman Catholics from the neighborhood and of visiting Southern Baptists from Texas. After enjoying much conversation and suffering the consequences of too much Tex-Mex,...
The Present Age and the State of Community
The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British Foreign Minister, uttered his epitaph of the war on the evening of...
Freedom of Opinion and Democracy
“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion: within these barriers, an author may write what he pleases; but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of...
Selling Heidegger Short
In Martin Heidegger’s existentialism, two centuries of German philosophy have culminated in an unexpected, almost scandalous way. Since Immanuel Kant, at least, this philosophy was bent on finding proofs that Being is unknowable, or that it is not God but the World Spirit, History, the Will to Power, the Proletariat, whatever. Heidegger went back to a tradition before Socrates, which...
New York Writing
“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.” —Somerset Maugham It is just possible that Tom Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, may be more important for extraliterary reasons than for purely literary ones. Of course, there are no purely literary reasons for anything, especially in the form of fiction, perhaps the most massive impure art...
LaRouche Back in the News
Lyndon LaRouche has been back in the news. Not only is the leader himself on trial for the political equivalent of credit card fraud, but in Illinois the two LaRouche candidates who managed to torpedo Adlai Stevenson’s gubernatorial campaign are both running again. LaRouche is, so far as we can tell, an unlikable crank without principles or policies. Still, we...
Noah’s Ark or a Nation State?
A Noah’s Ark or a nation state? seems to be the question posed by the U.S. immigration policy. “Eviction[s] because of building charcoal fires indoors or slaughtering animals in the bathtub” are only some of the problems facing immigrant Hmong and Mein tribesmen in California. Others are “their medicinal use of opium, their capturing of young brides . . ....
“Professional” Street Person
Billie Boggs used to be a bag lady—although she preferred the term “professional” street person. She slept in front of a vent outside a New York restaurant, ran out into traffic, screamed obscenities at passersby, and defecated in her clothes or on the sidewalk outside the Chemical Bank. She begged for money, then burned it or threw it away; she...
Discipline By the Wayside
Brats—now we call them hyperactive children—used to be disciplined; these days they are given drugs. Many psychologists and school officials insist that Ritalin is the best treatment for children suffering from hyperactivity, or the “attention deficit disorder.” As a matter of routine, 15-year-old Rod Matthews of Canton, Massachusetts, was put on Ritalin as a means of controlling his unacceptable behavior....
The Closing of the American Mind
The Closing of the American Mind was last year’s liberal cliche of the year. This year, the left’s answer may well be I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates. Billed as an exercise in investigative reporting. Stone’s book does to Athens what I.F. Stone’s Weekly used to do to the United States. Stone’s “original” thesis is that Socrates’ antidemocratic sentiments got...
Better War Than Troubles
The Irish have a word—as they are supposed to—for this sort of book: blather. The author could be described as one of those fellows who “does go on,” to the point of being, eventually, barred from the pub for boring everyone to tears. The Gun in Politics bears the subtitle “An Analysis of Irish Political Conflict, 1916-1986.” If we are...