The significance of the past—the past of a minute or an hour ago, 100 years ago, or 5,000 years ago—is of consuming interest to me; many writers are concerned with the effects of time on people and institutions. The past provides writers with most of their raw material. Proust had only to taste a sweet, and the world of the...
Invasion of the Child-Snatchers
Who has more rights in the American judicial system—a man accused of murder or one accused of child abuse? The accused murderer is guaranteed the good old English right of trial by jury; he’s presumed innocent until proved guilty. He may even demand a court-appointed lawyer (if he can’t afford his own). The accused child abuser is tried by French...
Catastrophic Health Insurance
Catastrophic health insurance—already endorsed by the President and now on the fast track to approval in Congress—will soon shift the economic burden of huge unexpected medical bills from the elderly to the federal government. But already some members of Congress are complaining that a much more inclusive public health-care plan is needed. Unfortunately, most policymakers forget how much the nation’s...
Fillet of Soul
Entertainment industry awards shows are, almost by definition, public orgies of televised backslapping. Still, TV viewers stick with them, not so much to discover what the best movie, TV show, or record is—for each viewer already knows what’s best—but in order to see personalities in environments that put them out of character and in competition with other celebrities. During, say,...
Pork Politics
“There is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress.” —Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar Mark Twain, responsible for the foregoing, was being funny. His remark, however, is steadily becoming a little more true and a little less funny. The U.S. Congress, through indirection and guile rather than by overt vote, has managed to give itself a pay raise. The national press,...
Old Wine Fermenting
One New Age guru still on a roll is Rabbi Sherwin Wine. Twenty-three years ago, before his rise, he was an unbelieving rabbi without a congregation. Known for his willingness to violate Talmudic law by marrying Jews to gentiles, this fall Wine became co-chairperson of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews. At the Birmingham Temple, Wine’s congregation in Farmington...
A Second Opinion
This profoundly conservative book forms a powerful personal argument against the liberal dogma that “modernity” destroys religion. Much of the left, militantly secular as it is, has attempted to make it “self-evident” that no reasonable person can believe in God, let alone in a particular religious tradition and its revelation. “We all know” that religion is a dying vestige of...
Where the Action Is
Between now and the turn of the century, 16 eastern and southeastern states will celebrate 200 years of statehood. Here in the hinterlands, seven more states will have their 100th birthday. Then there will be just five state centennials left, with Alaska and Hawaii as late desserts in 2059—when many East Coast states will be close to 300 years old....
How I Spent My Christmas Vacation
The day after Christmas this family took off for the National Cheerleaders Association’s High School Cheerleaders National Championship in Orlando, Florida. The National Cheerleaders Association’s High School Cheerleaders National Championship is not the kind of event a parent—this parent, anyway—ever anticipates attending. It is the kind of event a parent discovers herself at because of the interests or accomplishments of...
Unraveling the Remnant
“Whatever the road to power, that is the road which will be trod.” —Edmund Burke For years, or at least for that stretch of time between the heady days of Theodore Roosevelt and the hapless days of Jimmy Carter, something called the Eastern establishment benevolently ruled over America. For years, or at least between the demon days of Franklin Roosevelt...
The Forsyth Saga
You may recall last January’s events in Forsyth County, Georgia, when a newly arrived Californian announced his presence by attempting to organize a march in Gumming, the county seat, to honor Martin Luther King. That bait wouldn’t tempt an undiscriminating catfish, but a few of the local old boys rose to it anyway, displaying once again the simplicity that is...
Institutionalized Music
Samuel Lipman’s pieces on music came out originally in magazines, chiefly in Commentary and The New Criterion. The obvious question arises. Are enough of these essays of sufficient interest and importance to justify republication? The answer is happily yes. Lipman’s candor, taste, and intelligence as well as the wide range of his musical interests make him one of the most...
Fine China
“In this age of decadence people love antiques and willingly submit to deception.” —Cheng Hsieh, 18th-century Chinese poet and painter Anyone who fondly supposes that the Chinese Communists are the “good” Communists should read this exciting, powerful book by the Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryekmans, writing under his nom de plume, Simon Leys. As far back as 1974, Leys’s book Chinese...
A Superfluous Man
“I once voted at a presidential election. There being no real issue at stake, I cast my vote for Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. I knew Jeff was dead, but I voted on Artemus Ward’s principle that if we can’t have a live man who amounts to anything, by all means let’s have a first-class corpse.” —Albert Jay Nock, A Journal...
Love and Death
Perhaps it is inevitable that Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman has been compared to Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There are obvious parallels. Tolstoy wrote a lengthy book on the unsuccessful Napoleonic invasion of Russia, while Grossman wrote a lengthy book on the unsuccessful Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Both works also deal with central philosophical issues, especially...
One Week in the Life of the World of Art
Sunday, March 29. On the eve of Christie’s auction, Brian Sewell writes in The Sunday Times Magazine of Van Gogh’s intention to frame his Sunflowers series in slender wooden slats painted bright orange “to set the siennas, cinnabars, and ochres dancing.” The Observer predicts that the painting will “reach at least £10 million” in frenzied bidding. Putting this in a...
Past and Present
“The handwriting on the wall may be a forgery.” —Ralph Hodgson A steady flow of scholarly works on the intellectual roots of modern conservatism has appeared since the 1950’s. Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind was and remains the best and the best-known of such books, but similar studies by Peter Viereck, Clinton Rossiter, and others are also wellknown and useful....
Why I Am Not ‘Conservative’
Like most sociologists, I am conservative in the sense that I believe in the existence of barely perceived social mechanisms—mechanisms that satisfy the deep physiological, psychological, and cultural needs. This sociological world view contains a conservative element: the belief that a sufficiently great attempt to alter society will introduce more unintended, and undesired, consequences than the innovators can anticipate. At...
Cultural Conservation
A few years back, when the air was fresh and the world was new, some of us thought that the election of Ronald Reagan was only the beginning of the beginning of “morning in America.” It is a common mistake. Some decades have an identity for those who set their mark upon them. In periods like the 1890’s, the 1920’s,...
The Triumph of Time
The second law of thermodynamics poses a problem for evolutionary biologists. While it seems to predict increasing disorder over time, the record of evolution suggests ever-increasing order and higher levels of organization. The common solution to the paradox was to look for a balance between organic systems and their environment. Perhaps there was, as Schrodinger suggested, a trade-off by which...
Notes on Art Restoration: The Sistine Chapel
The present controversy around the restoration of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling prompts the following reflections on restorative work in general, and that of our time in particular. Our age will be known by future historians as one in which all certitudes were questioned, while the True and the Good were on the defensive. Beauty, also tottering, still rallies the largest...
Old Babbitts Die Hard
“Believe me, it’s the fellow with four to ten thousand a year, say, and an automobile and a nice little family in a bungalow on the edge of town, that makes the wheels of progress go round.” —George F. Babbitt The most prominent buildings of a civilization speak eloquently of what it esteems. The great medieval cathedrals of France rose...
Source of Great Expectation
The Reagan Court has been a source of great expectation for conservatives. If only a few more superannuated justices would retire (or die), then we could have the court’s unchecked authority in our own hands. A favorite target of pious hopes and voodoo dolls is the apparently senile Thurgood Marshall. An example of tokenism at its worst, Marshall has consistently...
A Crazy Dance of Technicalities
Dressed in a dark business suit, wearing a tie and a brand-new trenchcoat, Troy Canty was led manacled in front of New York State Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Crane. His head clean-shaven, Canty looked sullenly at TV cameras, out in force to register the latest twist in the Bernhard H. Goetz case. On December 22, 1984, dressed somewhat differently,...
Will It Play in Peoria?
Chronicles readers may remember that in my last letter I described the “Russian Style” exhibition in London as a Soviet propaganda ballon d’essai, flown to test Western media response to the new nationalism emanating from Moscow. It is by no means coincidental that such a test should be made here rather than in the United States: The more diverse and...
A Myth In A Garden
The following is the text of Mr. Lytle’s speech at the 1986 Ingersoll Prizes Awards Banquet: Born the day after Christmas, 1902, like a wet firecracker, as my mother remarked, I entered a world that lived with and by other creatures. My grandchildren and their ilk are unaware that they are creatures. I am closer to the 12th century than...
Letter to Another Editor
“More and more, the categories we think by are forms of darkness. Yet we keep using them as if fearful of the deeper darkness we’d inhabit if we had to front this life without them.” —Jack Beatty, “The Category Crisis,” Atlantic (March 1986) An open letter to Jack Beatty, Editor, Atlantic Monthly Dear Jack: I hope you will overlook this...
Players of the Game
” . . . to chase the rolling circle’s speed Or urge the Hying ball . . . “ —Thomas Gray The Puritans, who once condemned stool ball, quoits, and bowls, would stand in stern judgment of the millions of Americans who every Sunday choose a ball game over church attendance. Yet game-playing did begin in ritual and religion, and...
Manly Codes
When Chuck Yeager was shot down behind enemy lines in World War II, shrapnel wounds in his feet and hands, German Messerschmitts still above him, he remained calm and controlled. “Back home,” he said, “if we had a job to do, we did it. And my job now is to evade capture and escape.” When the engine of a fellow...
A Female Aesthetic
While Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig are desperate to find, if not manufacture, a “female aesthetic,” it fails to emerge from their Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights; in fact, most of the 30 represented playwrights deny either its existence or its relevance. Liliane Atlan (French) claims, “I don’t look for the masculine or the feminine elements; both exist in the...
Character in Acting
To 18th-century Britons and Americans who devoted any serious thought to the subject of human nature—and a great many did—the conventional starting point was the theory of the passions, or drives for self-gratification. Rousseau to the contrary, man was not naturally good but was ruled by his passions, both primary (fear, hunger, lust) and secondary (cravings for money, power, certainty,...
Rock Around the Bank
Now that ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it You play the guitar on the MTV That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free (©1985 Chariscourt Ltd./Adm. Almo Music) Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” ironically sums up the popular attitude toward the music business. After all, performing on stage...
Death and Taxes
Death and taxes are only a little more predictable than the art of Andy Warhol. Just one month after Warhol’s death in Manhattan at age 58 from a heart attack the morning of February 22, the day after otherwise successful gall bladder surgery, the artist was back in the news. Unlike the obits, the news wasn’t on the front page;...
Prairie Dog
Fairbanks has an interesting hypothesis: that early prairie women loved the plains and their adventurous lives here as much as pioneer men did. I have never believed in the myth that every pioneer woman was long-suffering, silently hating the prairie and the man who brought her here. I was pleased to think that I’d found here some justification for my...
Gay Violence
It was Homecoming 1986 at Jamestown College in southeastern North Dakota. Scott Westcott, 19, was at the dance. So was Shaun Erickson, 28, a senior who lectures and writes widely about his homosexuality. The room was crowded, and, according to Westcott, his eyes kept meeting Erickson’s across it. Young Westcott didn’t like that one bit. When Erickson tried to make...
The Order of Virtue
For some time now, the literature of the sporting world has offered one of the most agreeable ways of experiencing revisions of public reality. Perhaps this is why it is hard to read Howard Cosell’s best-seller I Never Played the Game without a sense of deja vu. “In the beginning,” he writes, “I had romantic ideas about sports,” but 15...
Life in the Rust Belt
Last August marked the 50th anniversary of the first field trials of the Rust cotton picker, an occasion little noted outside the pages of Forbes, where I saw it. Somebody should have made a bigger deal about it. For better or for worse, that machine has transformed the South in my lifetime, and maybe yours, too. Oh, sure, you don’t...
Catholic Church USA
Three histories of the Catholic Church in the United States have become available within a two-year period—books by James Hennesey, S.J., Martin Marty, and now Jay P. Dolan, the bitterest of the three. More remarkable than the mere number are the significant likenesses. Are they the result of the zeitgeist or an attempt to shape it? The specter of an...
The Long War
Platoon directed and written by Oliver Stone Hemdale Film Corporation & Orion Pictures Some opinions are communicated like a virus, and the received wisdom on Platoon is a good example of this cultural dissemination on the scale of an epidemic. It’s a movie that moviegoers have flocked to, and as for our collected punditry, bowing and scraping before Platoon‘s fashionable...
Romanticism, Ever New
Modern music criticism has engaged in a Herculean endeavor to misunderstand Romanticism, both as a historic and as a modern phenomenon. The 19th-century Romantics are relegated to the status of antiques. Their musical language is declared suitable for the musical museums of formal concerts but not worth taking seriously by modern composers. Above all, the modern critic attempts to reduce...
With Laurel: For Andrew Lytle
What makes it so appropriate that Andrew Lytle should receive the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters is that Mr. Lytle is one of the gifted people who inspired Dick Weaver’s career as what he called “an Agrarian in exile.” Moreover, an essay on the reissue I’ll Take My Stand was among the last things which Weaver wrote before...
Security Safari
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary, the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” —1 Peter, V, 8 The scene is so identifiable that any American—in fact, almost anyone anywhere in the world—immediately recognizes it: a dun-baked, dusty street between rows of ramshackle, weather-beaten, false-fronted buildings. To the pounding beat of rising music, a...
Letter From the Southwest
Academe, n. An Ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n. (from academe). A modern school where football is taught. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) In the spring a young man’s fancy turns lightly to thoughts of love. What happens in the rest of the year is uncertain, but in the southwestern part of the United States...
Babbitt in the Eighties
Six of this book’s 10 essays were presented at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Irving Babbitt’s death. Held in Washington, DC, at The Catholic University of America in November 1983, the conference brought together scholars of various disciplines to address the general subject of “Irving Babbitt: Fifty Years Later.” Although some people might assume that Babbitt has nothing...
Politics of Weakness
In the 1980’s the doctrine of sexual equality is increasingly being misapplied. The current discussion of women’s sports provides a graphic illustration. The central premise of the sexual egalitarian is simple: It is unjust to reward or support a woman less than a man, when the woman performs on the same level. Many would agree that this should be the...
Arms and The Man
I must have been 11 or 12 years old before my father put a gun into my hands and told me to shoot. By then, I had been out hunting with him several times a year but I had not ceased marveling at the efficiency and grace with which he handled a shotgun or a rifle. Once, I remember, we...
Prurient Puritans
These apparently very different books—a cultural history and research on American sexual mores—actually address the same issue: the attempt to reconcile morality and the sexual impulse. A typically puritanical endeavor, because the puritan, with his eternal bad conscience about things that may not please God, that is sin, goes through mental, moral, and behavioral contortion in order to legitimize what...
Smile When You Say ‘Psychiatrist’
I did not mean to harm anyone when I bought a Bachelor of Arts degree in Child Psychology for $100. I meant it to be a bitter joke on myself I was going to hang it up in my room, much as an important man might hang a Playboy cartoon on a wall in his home. I had had a...
Thrice-Told Tales
Politics and tale-telling are virtually inseparable activities. Great political events—wars, rebellions, social crusades—do not exert their full measure of influence until they are whittled into legends. More than one British statesman has derived his understanding of the Wars of the Roses from Shakespeare’s Histories, and in the United States the stories of Washington at Valley Forge, Lincoln the man of...
Some Thoughts on Being A Writer
The following is the text of Mr. Naipaul’s speech at the 1986 Ingersoll Prizes Awards Banquet. I do not really know how I became a writer. I can give certain dates and certain facts about my career. But the process itself remains mysterious. It is mysterious, for instance, that the ambition should have come first—the wish to be a writer,...