“Of all the frauds that ever have been perpetrated on our generation, this ‘psychography’ is the worst,” wrote Douglas Southall Freeman a few weeks before his death, adding, “How dare a man say what another man is thinking when he may not know what he himself is thinking!” This criticism is what the distinguished biographer of Robert E. Lee and...
Falling Off the Turnip Truck
“And somewhere, waiting for its birth, / The shaft is in the stone.” —Henry Timrod Searching for the “Southern quality” once identified by Marshall McLuhan can be an absorbing and rewarding quest. After all, the South is a vast and varied region, one that has, as things go in this country, a lot of history and a brace of interlocking...
Don’t Tread On Me
I had the intense pleasure of visiting the White Mountains of New Hampshire in August. Although I’m happy where I am, I think I could be happy there, too, and if anyone wants to give me a family-and-pet-sized cabin halfway up a mountain, write to me in care of Chronicles. I fell in love with the New Hampshire landscape, but...
A Week in the Life: A TV Diary
You are what you eat. Up to a point, I tend to believe that maxim. Because I am unwilling to apply it to my own life, I also tend to resent it. The food police are everywhere, and the harder they work, the less there is to eat. For instance, if you should eat an ordinary hot dog, you could...
The Fear of Crisis
In the November 1986 Encounter, the Princeton University economist Harold James sets out to tell us “Why We Should Learn to Love a Crisis.” His explanation is not quite what we would expect from a champion of a market economy. In that economy, he says, crises serve a necessary function; states should not try to avoid them out of a...
It’s Time for (Yawn) Another Election
It hasn’t escaped attention down here that it’s an election year. My buddy Eugene, who cares about these things more than is good for him, explained to me the other day why George Bush is going to be our next President. “Well,” he said, “first we had Jimmy doing his Woodrow Wilson impression, right? Upright Christian soul, square dealing among...
The First Ring of Hostility
Cows sacred, evil, and venal are shot by Vladimir Voinovich in this satiric look at the Soviet Union that reads like a combination “Ivan in Wonderland” and Zamiatin’s WE. The hero of Moscow 2042, like Voinovich, is a Soviet émigré writer living in West Germany. Our protagonist, Vitaly Kartsev, takes a 30-day trip by airplane back to a Moscow 60...
Color-Coding the Pennsylvania Pension Fund
Representative Ron Gamble’s speech on the floor of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives against legislation to divest Pennsylvania pension funds from South Africa: I oppose this legislation wholeheartedly because state government has no business dealing with foreign policy. However, if we are going to initiate a foreign policy based on compassion for our fellow man, let’s do it fairly and...
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 with spectacular points of reference,...
Who’s In Charge Here?
America, in case you haven’t noticed, is lost in the throes of celebrating the writing of its Constitution, which is now two centuries old. The somewhat labored efforts to fix public attention on the historic document are largely the work of former Chief Justice Warren Burger and his own private bureaucracy in the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S....
The Statecraft of Stooges
The speaker of the House of Representatives negotiates cordially with a Marxist dictator at the very time when the American government is sending aid to an armed resistance movement fighting to overthrow his regime; a political preacher flies to the Middle East and discusses the most sensitive foreign policy issues with unfriendly heads of state; the son of a Communist...
The First Green International
Peasant agrarianism, some say, was Central Europe’s “missed opportunity” for independent political development in this century. Such arguments have been heard particularly since 1947, as the refugees from Marxist Europe organized their International Peasant Union and met every other year tu talk about what might have been. The case is compelling, to a degree. For while Europe’s agrarian movement has...
Whose War Is It, Anyway?
According to Josef Joffe, foreign editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German historian Ernst Nolle once asked at a Harvard seminar whether anyone present could find the idea of the “Final Solution” in history before Hitler. Since no one answered, he drew the attention of his audience to the work of Marx and the concept of annihilation of the bourgeoisie...
Jefferson, New and Improved
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” —Thomas Jefferson With the exception of the driven and depressed Lincoln, no major figure in American history is, in the final analysis, more enigmatic than Jefferson. Without any exception, none is more complex. There is more to the enigma and complexity than a multitude of facets—political leader, botanist,...
Breaking the Antaean Bond
Corn planting season has arrived again, and the soil is moving. Hot spring winds that have foresters on red alert are picking up the earth, clay fractions first, and sending it off. This gale mocks the fine print don’ts on the 50-pound sacks of rootworm pesticide. It too is blowing in the wind. No way will the stuff conform to...
The Null Set
Less Than Zero directed by Marek Kanievska screenplay by Harley Peyton based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis 20th Century Fox Tom Waits recently suggested to Musician magazine that if John Lennon knew that Michael Jackson would control The Beatles’ music, Lennon would “kick his ass—and kick it really good.” As I watched the film version of Bret Easton...
The New Age in Copenhagen
For centuries philosophers have grappled with the question of how society should be organized. The overarching issues involve the maintenance of order and the distribution of political power. While the answers to these knotty problems varied greatly from Plato to Burke, there was a belief that these concerns were essential lineaments in social organization. Even many of the 19th-century anarchists...
Swan Song
“Did you hear what happened to the swan?” Tucked away in the residential area along suburban Philadelphia’s main line lies the idyllic campus of Eastern College. For the last four years this Christian academic institution has sponsored the Evangelical Roundtable: an attempt to find definition in the ideologically shattered realms of Evangelical-land. “The Roundtable,” says the promotional material, “is designed...
The Dakota Men
“What ever happened to real men . . . the kind of men with good old-fashioned values like honesty, integrity, sincerity, and ambition?” asks FOOD—Farmers of Ongoing Determination—in a promotional flier. It turns out that they think they have a corner on the real-man market—and I’m willing to let them suspend my disbelief. North Dakotans Larry Jaeger and Karen Tyndall...
My Country 60’s
I lived in Vermont from 1962-71, and I met many of what I later came to call 60’s people. While I recognized them for what they were at the time—that required no great penetration—nevertheless there were things about them that puzzled me: Why did they suddenly appear in droves there and then? Why were they taken so seriously? Most puzzling...
Pseudo-History of Events
Horace Greeley may have had it right for his 19th-century compatriots, but the proper direction for the ambitious voyagers of this century has too often been eastward. Just ask New Mexico’s own Samuel Andrew Donaldson. No one asked her, but Chloe Hampson Donaldson thinks she knows why her son strayed from the straight and narrow path: “Sam was always an...
Mutiny In Paradise
In December 1787 His Majesty’s armed transport Bounty crept out of Portsmouth harbor on a clandestine mission, heading for the vast and largely uncharted South Pacific. Tahiti, a tiny pinpoint of land in the Polynesian Islands, was the goal. In October 1788, the Bounty dropped anchor in Tahiti’s spectacular Matavai Bay. In April 1789, she set out for Jamaica, West...
Dulce et Decorum
One of the most moving war memorials I know is on a wall outside the reading room of the British Museum. It is a simple plaque with the names of a hundred or so librarians killed in the Great War. Librarians. Think about it. That plaque makes a point, doesn’t it, if not perhaps the one it was intended to...
Hysterical Expectations
Frederick the Great of Prussia once said that heads of state should avoid meeting one another. With all the hyperbole surrounding the Reagan/Gorbachev summit, the three-day meeting aroused almost hysterical expectations, setting up Americans, inevitably, for a fall. Previous summit conferences should have taught us at least that much. In 1972 President Nixon went to Moscow to sign the SALT...
The Christian and Creation
Where does man fit into nature? What is his response to the created universe? Lynn White has argued that the Christian position is at the very heart of the environmental crisis. He, and others, see the biblical view of the dominion of man over nature as being responsible for our misuse of our natural resources. White argues, “Both our present...
Why Souls Fly Away
“Some parrots are legale but why cage exotic birds at all?” —Chris Wille, NAS Don’t ask me, was my first thought. The last parrot I owned was—I swear—killed 10 years ago by an ex-friend who, with Joseph Krutch, believed that hunting was the ultimate evil. He left the bird loose in a room with my cats. Still, the larger implications...
A Time to Reap
I do not know what the city-bred recollect of childhood, but one of my earliest memories is of a sunny Easter morning, when I was no more than three or four years old, standing in an unpaved lane that led down to a tiny farm: the bright new grass was pushing through last year’s burnt-over stubble; the chickens muttered approvingly...
Technology and the Ethical Imperative
There is a very interesting article by Professor David Levy in the February 1987 The World & I, which deserves a further meditation on the issue it raises. Two thinkers provide Levy with his point of speculative take-off: Arnold Gehlen (Man in the Age of Technology) and Hans Jonas (The Imperative of Responsibility). Their fundamental thesis, that Levy (a professor...
Sterile Prairie
“Look how wide also the east is from the west: so far hath he set our sins from us.” —Psalm 103 It has been said that an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. But the life of the mind hardly requires that William and Henry, rather than Frank and...
A Good Side
Nuclear disarmament has its good side. Europeans and Americans have been sheltered by the nuclear umbrella so long that they have begun to dream of a world without war. That sort of Utopian rubbish is not only demoralizing for the soft, welfare state inhabitants of the Western democracies, but—even worse—it also compels our leaders to engage in public dishonesty whenever...
Lavender Liberals
Lavender liberals recently held the National Conference of Openly Lesbian and Gay Elected and Appointed Officials in Minneapolis. Graced by the presence of two delegates from Canada’s New Democratic Party and one from the British House of Commons, the conference adopted a resolution (supported by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Senator Paul Simon) calling for further appointments of homosexuals to “posts...
Anatomy of a Swindle
I never thought I would be a sucker for royalty, but there is now a good reason to admire Prince Charles. He hates Richard Rogers. In August, the British press reported on the dismay of the nation’s “architectural profession, flinching at the prospects of another outburst along the lines of ‘monstrous carbuncle’ (the Prince’s dismissal of an extension at the...
Stopping the Long March Through the University
“A Leninist cannot simply be a specialist in his favorite branch of science. . . . He must be an active participant in the political leadership of his country.” —Slogan of Moscow University Substitute “professor” for “Leninist” and the quotation would appear almost a cliche to many American academicians. Yet such corollary Leninist themes and variations have become a commonplace...
Cut-Flower Moralists
“Tell me, can you find indeed Nothing sure, no moral plan Clear prescribed, without your creed?” —Matthew Arnold Awaiting trial for a murder he did not commit, Dmitri Karamazov is visited in jail in the closing pages of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov by the progressive intellectual Rakitin. Rakitin tries to explain why modern ethics no longer needs religion. “What will...
The Search for Salvation
There is a popularly held belief that the promise of theater resided throughout the country. According to the theory, if Broadway was dying, then American theater was thriving west of the Hudson and south of the Delaware Water Gap, nurturing not only the talent but also the audience. There has been a problem, of course, so overwhelming that no one...
Dreams of Education
“They say such different things at school.” -W.B. Yeats William Butler Yeats, Senator of the Irish Republic, heard about contemporary trends in education from “a kind old nun in a white hood”: The children learn to cipher and to sing, to study reading-books and history, to cut and sew, be neat in everything in the best modern way. All that...
Future Shock?
This won’t be easy. But, it may be the future, at least according to a number of science-fiction writers collectively known as the “cyberpunks.” More disturbingly, there seems to be a number of scientists and researchers who agree. Hang on. The first part of the word cyberpunks comes from cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert Wiener in 1948. Essentially, cybernetics...
The Middle of the World
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Cayambe, Antisana, Tungurahua—the jaw-cracking, eye-chart names thunder from the map with the grandeur of the 6,000-meter, snow-capped volcanoes most of them are, staking out the spine of the Ecuadorian Andes, some of the world’s finest scenery. Indeed, no fewer than 11 such nevados may be seen on a clear day from the Latacunga valley south of the capital,...
You Can Lead a Horse to Water
I came across Mitch Snyder’s name the other day. Remember Mitch? He made the news first about three years ago, when, as head of the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV), a Washington-based “homeless rights” group, he spoke out against the indignities perpetrated against 61 -year-old Jesse Carpenter, who “froze to death in the shadow of the White House.” Snyder called...
Genius: A Clear and Present Danger
I hold in my hand the names of 205 credit-card-carrying members of the human race who’ve been described by a word that’s fast becoming as irritating as superstar, glitz, or life-style. The word is genius, and it’s time we recognized, with all Churchillian gravity, that from Stettin in the Baltic to the psychobabble retreats in Marin County, people are being...
Goetzing Down in the Gunfire State
Last October 1, Florida’s new handgun law went into effect and the talking hairdos on the evening news had an arched-eyebrow contest. As you may have heard, law-abiding Floridians, tired of being an unarmed minority in the Sunshine State, rared back and passed a law that allows any Floridian with no police record, $145, and two hours to spare for...
Why Tell It Straight?
Matewan written and directed by John Sayles Cinecom Entertainment Group In 1920 Matewan was a little town on the western edge of Mingo County, West Virginia, right on the Kentucky border. It was a town owned and run by the Stone Mountain Coal Company, and when the miners tried to bring in the union, the county in general and Matewan...
A Report on the Warfare Used Against Language Critics
A few years ago when I read Grammar and Good Taste by Dennis E. Baron, I was surprised by the contempt with which the author, a linguist teaching at a university, spoke of language critics. I was aware, of course, of the ritual cursing of traditional grammar and grammarians by some writers of introductory books about modern grammar, but such...
Thoughts On Mikhail Bulgakov
I always think of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov with tenderness, as if he were my relative, and a very close and dear one at that. Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was not my relative. I was not even fortunate to know him personally—he died a few years before I was born. Once, in a conversation with the editor of this magazine, the name...
Academic Afterword: On the Occasion of My Retirement From the Academy
In my institution I have been sharply critical of the public relations attempts at self-justification and self-elevation in the interest of the community’s largess, the larger grants of public money to support a larger and larger institution. I have been particularly critical of my school’s official insistence that its primary concern is with “new knowledge,” a phrase I quote from...
Cottage Diplomacy
The premise of Citizen Diplomats by Gale Warner and Michael Shuman, with a foreword by Carl Sagan, is simple: America’s elected politicians and professional diplomats have been so inadequate in managing relations with the Soviet Union and coping with the nuclear threat that concerned citizens themselves should do all they can to improve our understanding with the Soviets. While the...
An Elegy to a Writer
Pearl Craigie, the long forgotten novelist and playwright “John Oliver Hobbes,” who died in 1906, is due for resurrection. She has haunted me for over 40 years. It was through my study of the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore in the 1940’s (particularly through Joseph Hone’s biography of him), that Mrs. Craigie first came into my ken, piqued my curiosity, and...
Hooked on Socialism
“In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.” —Tocqueville Norman Podhoretz, in the March 11, 1987, Washington Post, describes Sidney Hook as “one of the most courageous intellectuals of the twentieth century.” While this particular description may more aptly be used for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others who have fought for human dignity in the face...
Place of Asylum
The theater is dead, the novel dying, poetry extinct; biography is the province of graveyard ghouls, and history a battleground on which disheveled armies of academic theorists contend with hucksters and prostitutes for the fate of an entire civilization. These conclusions of a temperate man in a good humor pretty much sum up the business of literature in our time,...
Glasnost American Style
Glasnost American style is all the rage among the nation’s literati. At over a dozen universities, American academics are now waking up to the Soviet equivalents of Good Morning America and Richard Simmons. After years of watching our own People’s Broadcasting System, students and faculty alike may now get a glimpse of the real thing. America being America, however, the...