If in political and social terms the diminishing role of the aristocracy in Europe was, in the historian’s view, inevitable, in cultural terms its dissipation was not really felt until the turn of the century. Indeed, the intellectual history of our time is a record of careless exploitation and ruthless expropriation of what had once been an aristocratic preserve, with...
Conservative Commons
American conservatism in the late 18th century was unlike the European species, where popular “peasant” and articulate “aristocratic” conservatism were able to develop together and to maintain a common front against the ascendant bourgeoisie. With the exile of loyalists and the waning of the old Federalists, American conservatism was effectively decapitated; nevertheless, a popular conservatism continued to endure in the...
What the Founders Didn’t Count On
“I assert that the people of the United States . . . have sufficient patriotism and intelligence to sit in judgment on every question which has arisen or which will arise no matter how long our government will endure.” —William Jennings Bryan As citizens it is fitting that we engage in acts of civic piety while celebrating the bicentennial of...
A New Logic of Human Studies
Consider the following paradoxes. A welfare system designed by well-meaning politicians guided by the advice of the wisest sociologists and economists available, costing billions of dollars, whose net effect is radically to increase the numbers of the poor, especially women and children, and to deepen their misery, incapacity, and despair. A stock market which rises because the statistical instruments designed...
Netting Reagan, or All the President’s Legs
When Thomas Mann joined the West Coast galaxy of refugees from Hitler, he was writing Doctor Faustus—a study of, among other things, national character and demonology. The word meant roughly the same as what Michael Rogin means by it: the countersubversive drives that label, persecute, and sometimes eliminate pernicious forces in the body politic. In that bizarre Hollywood feudality that...
It’s 10 A.M. on a School Day—Do You Know Who Has Your Child?
Americans generally agree that our public schools are not what they should be, but the strongest resistance to improvement comes from the jokes some people refer to as “teachers’ unions.” Take the strange ease of a Minneapolis nonprofit corporation. Public School Incentives (PSI), which has proposed some interesting measures for public schools. PSFs founder, Ted Kolderie, says that one of...
Covering Dixie Like the Dew
Time for another round-up of Southern news you may not have seen. Let’s start off slow, with this item from the Chapel Hill (NC) Newspaper, back in February. Arnold D. Rollins of Rt. 5 Box 372, Chapel Hill, reported a hit-and-run accident on Columbia St. and Rosemary St. at 11:30. According to police reports, a pedestrian ran into the corner...
Study in Scarlet
“The Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.” —H.H. Munro Roger’s Version, John Updike’s latest novel, can be understood best if seen in intimate and serious connection with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. First, the cast of characters: Hester (Esther), Arthur Dimmesdale (Dale Kohler), Roger Chillingworth (Roger Lambert), and Pearl (Paula/Poopsie). The setting is New England. In both...
Judicial Editing and Congressional Inaction
Much has been written in recent years on how courts construe law, whether it is the Constitution or a statute. The discussion typically addresses the judiciary’s search for the “intent” of the framers or legislators and reflects a continuing debate on what limitations our system of government places on a court when it applies written law to the facts of...
A Dike To Fence Out the Flood
When in September of 1787 the new instrument of government proposed by the Great Convention went out from Philadelphia to be received and considered by the several commonwealths connected through the old Articles of Confederation, those fraternally affiliated societies saw the document delivered to them through the Continental Congress according to their own needs and purposes—out of their distinctive histories...
Fast-Food Regionalism
Every day we hear references to North, South, East, and West, to Midwest and Southwest, to Pacific Northwest and, lo, even to Ozarkia, Cascadia, and Siskiyou. All of us speak or write of these geographical areas as if they had narrowly prescribed boundaries readily meaningful to everyone. Yet in reality these designations, as Humpty Dumpty would say, mean only what...
Revolution
Times of crisis are not distinguished by respect for rights—although, paradoxically, all revolutions claim to be mounted in the name of rights. During our War of Independence, criticism of the patriot cause was an invitation to a lynching, and Jefferson defined the Tory as “a traitor in thought, if not in deed.” In 1773 George Rome, a Rhode Island Tory,...
Reason and the Ethical Imagination
“A perfect democracy is . . . the most shameless thing in the world.” —Edmund Burke More than 50 years after his death, Irving Babbitt continues to evoke a sympathetic response horn minds and temperaments attuned to the ethical world view fostered by classical and Christian thought. Within the last decade, much of his writing has been reprinted, and a...
Tyranny In a Good Cause
Democracy or Republic? might well be the title of the D debate between liberals and conservatives on the nature of the American political system. (In the view of some liberals, the easiest way to spot a conservative is the habit of referring to America as a republic.) Democracy, in the strict procedural sense of one man/one vote and majority rule,...
The Novel of Ideas
“Death must be distinguished from dying, with which it is often confused. “ —Rev. Sydney Smith The rarest entity in American writing is the novelist with ideas—that is to say, one who is capable of writing the ideological novel. Of course, the term is enough to put a chill on what is in fact the novel of intelligence—even, one might...
Planned Obsolescence
Dr. Lavoie, assistant professor of economics at George Mason University, argues that planning—whether Marxism, economic democracy, or other designation—must inevitably disrupt social and economic coordination. The problem of how to effectively use knowledge in society to produce the goods and services which the public wants cannot be solved by central planning and control. Lavoie takes on the “radical” spokesmen, such...
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 market of both science fiction...
A Technical Point
The event known as the accident at Chernobyl will be remembered by history for the scarcity of contemporary information about it in the world at large, a degree of ignorance far more remarkable than the event itself. The event, after all, was diagnosed as an accident, which made it interesting to the antinuclear left; was it not to their advantage...
The War Years
World War II seems both near and far away. In one sense, it seems like only yesterday that I was 17 years old, in uniform, and in Georgia and California. In another sense, that period is ancient history. We have traversed a century or more in human experience since the early 1940’s. The conflict was a vast maelstrom that changed...
Myths of Imperialism
“The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.” —Joseph Chamberlain In a rational world, the term “imperialism” might have been a carefully defined and useful tool of political and social analysis, part of the study of how empires come into being. But the story of “imperialism” is typical of the decadent intellectual history...
An American Prometheus
Sprawled on the sands of the New Mexico desert, Isador Isaac Rabi was witness on July 16, 1945, to a demonstration of scientific power so spectacular that neither his welder’s glasses nor his analytical training could fully shield him from its awe-inspiring effects: Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that...
AIDS and Public Morality
The AIDS plague should be approached temperately because, like the Kennedy assassination, it is one of those universally frightening phenomena that is likely to ignite the pool of vulgarity, hysteria, and kookery that lie just below the surface, among the high as well as among the low. Having casually followed the pronouncements of the government and media on this issue,...
Resolutely Abstract
The avant-garde, according to those who are supposed to know, has been entering the mainstream, but the commentators busy cataloging this development for future art historians seem to have forgotten that “avant-garde” and “mainstream” are mutually exclusive terms. Once our present has become past, it may become clearer that the greatest artists of this period are not the celebrated painters...
The Empire At Europe’s End
In the German name for Austria, Osterreich, Reich denotes more than “empire” in the sense of territorial extension; there is also a certain spiritual content. In the Middle Ages, empire meant the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium, and after Christmas Day 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo XIII, the Sacer Imperator Romanus was a German and from 1440...
Summer of the Snake
In “Life-Line,” a story by Robert A. Heinlein, a scientist describes a man in the present as a “space-time event.” He explains, “Imagine this space-time event which we call Rogers as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother’s womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here and the cross-section we see...
The Treason System
The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. It means, literally, harm-joy, and refers to the nasty but common human tendency to rejoice when harm comes to someone else. In English, we don’t have the word, but we certainly have the phenomenon. Think of the nationwide jubilation over what happened to Richard Nixon (and, incidentally, to America) during the Watergate...
After Vatican II; Drinking the Holy Spirit Neat
It’s Charismatic Prayer Sharing, Thursday nights at 8:00 P.M. in the Community Room of the large Catholic church I attend with my family. Because I’ve been wanting to learn to pray better, I went recently. Lou, the man I’d talked to on the phone, walked over and greeted me. Another, Stan, a seraphic, unkempt. round little man with a wooden...
Letter From South Philadelphia
It’s mid-May, and Kate and I live in deep trepidation over the possibility that the Philadelphia Flyers will win the ugly looking, but highly coveted, Stanley Cup. Not that the town couldn’t use even such a minor honor. Two years ago, the city was lambasted worldwide for fielding its own air force and killing II people in a bombing run...
Facing the Untoward in a Memphis Men’s Room
I guess I should have known it would be an odd trip when the pilot told us as we were approaching Memphis that we could expect “a little choppiness, but nothing untoward.” Untoward? I was going to Oxford, Mississippi, last spring to lecture at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. I did that and made...
Selling Out
“Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?” —Juvenal On November 29, 1984, an FBI agent in Massachusetts took extensive notes from a long conversation with an alcoholic woman about the alleged Soviet spy activities of her former husband, John Walker. Barbara Walker initiated the meeting with a phone call on November 17. Her story was filed and forgotten. On January 24 Laura...
On Might
“I chant the new empire . . . “ —Walt Whitman Walt Whitman sang what he saw—in 1860, he gave a name to Madison’s and Jefferson’s vision of the new commonwealth. “[Our success],” Jefferson had said in 1801, “furnishes a new proof of the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine, that a republic can be preserved only in a small territory. The...
States of Nature
A renaissance of American interest in contemporary Africa has been stimulated by media blitzes on famine-ridden Ethiopia and politically volatile South Africa, and by an award- winning film about a Norwegian adulteress’s African farm. Among the current crop of books is David Lamb’s The Africans, an update of a 1983 book. Lamb, who spent four years in Nairobi as a...
West Beats East
Along with Xenophon and Plutarch, Herodotus may be the most underappreciated writer of antiquity. His Histories (by which he meant something like “investigations”) of the relations between Greeks and barbarians has more narrative power than most novels, more colorful incidents than any travel book, and more insight into human nature than any 1,000 works of sociology, psychology, or anthropology that...
Hemingway and the Biographical Heresy
“Vilify! Vilify! Some of it will always stick.” —Beaumarchais When I learned some time ago that the critic Kenneth S. Lynn was bringing out a book on the late Ernest Hemingway, hard on the heels of the large biographical study by Jeffrey Myers, I anticipated a reasonably cogent analysis of the stories, the several novels, and the most important of...
Military History: Vital, Neglected
“What does it profit the reader to wade through wars and battles and sieges if he is not to penetrate the knowledge of the causes which made one party succeed and the other fail?” —Polybius Polybius was the most perceptive chronicler of Rome’s rise to greatness. He concentrated on political and military history not merely to record the facts or...
Betraying His Country
Convicted traitor Clayton Lonetree wept as he described his upbringing on an Indian reservation orphanage and with his father, a brutal alcoholic. The Marine Corps was, he said, a way out of his misery, although his principal reasons for joining were patriotic. The military jury, unmoved by his arguments and those of his celebrity lawyer William Kunstler, sentenced Lonetree to...
Beginnings Past All Remembering
The Knights of Columbus Club is just beginning to buzz as we pull up at 7:45, 15 minutes fashionably late. Our cars hold two families of three people each; the two small boys—cousins, one in each car, for sanity’s sake—love each other madly and can’t bear the five-minute drive from our dinner at Bonanza. My husband’s aunt and uncle have...
Name That Tune
First things first. In the briefly intersecting histories of rock and roll and Pentecostalism, it is recorded that Jerry Lee Lewis, at age 15, was expelled from Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, for unrepentantly playing a boogie version of “My God Is Real.” In view of the depth and breadth of the Jim Bakker-PTL scandal, it seems only reasonable...
The Judgment of History
Satire is a difficult form these days. Reality keeps calling, and raising. Let me tell a story that illustrates the difficulty. Last November, when President Reagan’s Teflon began to wear thin, pundits began to write about how his “place in history” was being jeopardized. My buddy Tim, a historian, casually suggested that a President really needs professional historians on call...
Postmortem
“We would rather run ourselves down than not speak of ourselves at all.” —La Rochefoucauld When the reputable and talented die, it is often their fate to have their privacy examined in detail. This is a mixed blessing at best. How chilling it is to remember that Nijinski’s feet were cut open to see if the bones were somehow special....
Full Force
Full Metal Jacket directed by Stanley Kubrick screenplay by Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford based on the novel The Short-Timers by Hasford; Warner Bros. Funny, that a film about “Vietnam as it really was,” as Platoon was touted, should fall so wide of any mark of merit, and that Vietnam films with a surreal twist—Apocalypse Now and Kubrick’s latest....
The Revenge of History
History has a way of taking its revenge on those who would violate it. It does not forget. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich are some of the few Soviet-born intellectuals who have studied how much current Soviet policies and propaganda abuse Russian history. Their book is an eloquent effort to set straight the historical record since the seizure of power...
The New Freedom of Rhyme
In the days of Latinate learning, there was an animus against rhyme which must have been a considerable nuisance in that heavily inflected language. In his Observations on the Art of English Poesie of 1602, the English poet and composer Campion remarked: The facility and popularity of Rime creates as many poets as a hot summer, flies. Milton agreed with...
Greek Jive
“He fell with a thud to the ground and his armor clattered around him.” —Homer War Music, called by its author, Christopher Logue, an “account” of four books of the Iliad of Homer, is not a minor event. Its reception both in its native England, and now here, has been enthusiastic. For, English writing, especially in verse, may not generally...
Francophobia on the Right
Several years ago in Paris I was surprised to find young pamphleteers outside the Hotel de Ville (or “Chateau Chirac” as an acquaintance would say) shouting out, “Down with the bearded, sold-out socialists!” When I told friends at home, they seemed incredulous. After Reagan bombed Libya I remember that the people of England and West Germany, our supposed allies, demonstrated...
Sums of Disenchantment
Zulfikar Chose was born in Pakistan, grew up in British India, emigrated to England in 1952, and since 1969 has taught in the English department of the University of Texas. He is married to a Brazilian and has enough knowledge of South America to write novels set there. This is his 10th novel. He has also published a collection of...
Seclusion in the Mountains
Gary Hart has withdrawn to the seclusion of his Rocky Mountain home, claiming that the nation’s press, led by the Miami Herald, invaded his privacy. Donna Rice, an aspiring actress suddenly in the limelight, is spending most of her time denying to any reporter who will listen that there was anything immoral in her relationship with Hart. The national media,...
The Price Of Free Verse
“A post in our times,” wrote Thomas Love Peacock, “is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community.” What Peacock meant by civilized community is not too hard to guess: that rational, humane, progressive society of Britain and Northern Europe, which Peacock’s eccentric friends—Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron—all seemed bent on destroying. Poets were barbaric, because they continued to celebrate heroic violence and...
State of the Literary Essay
As a literary form, the essay was once thought to be doomed as the novel is said to be in its perennially announced demise. The familiar essay, in particular, brought to its classic perfection by Charles (“Elia”) Lamb in the early 19th century, still finds some continuity today in our many personalized newspaper columns and even in the irreducible TV...
Some Place in Time
“Rural areas are shrinking, accents are becoming less distinct, and Southerners are being tamed,” writes Pete Daniels of the changes which have transformed the agrarian nation of Davis and Lee into the modern South. Daniels may have his feet planted firmly in earthy Southern history, but there has not been a concerted demand by creationists that six-day creation be presented...