The schedule is rather monotonous for a lecturer invited to the big cities where universities are usually located. First comes the airport, then the car with the polite, smiling young man as a guide, then hotel room and restaurant, podium, introduction, photo graphs, the lecture itself-then the whole thing in reverse order the next day. Occasionally, the routine is broken...
Still At the Still Point
Thirty-one years ago, when I had aspirations as an up-and-coming critic in the Catholic press, I wrote an essay on T.S. Eliot that was published in the Jesuit weekly, America. I thought it daring to suggest that the major poet of our time was something less than the robust Christian figure which an effective propagation of the faith then clearly...
God’s Fool
Auberon Waugh’s finely sharpened pen cuts through the mist of illusions that prevent Americans from seeing Britain as it is. In these articles from the Spectator, he exposes a society nearly gone mad. Royalty and commoner, young and old, liberal and conservative are routed by Waugh’s scathing satire. He writes of the follies of socialism in which the Nanny State...
Back to Barbarism
Much of the bioregional vision should appeal to conservative sentiments. As the pitiful remnant of America’s agrarian culture again falls victim to drought and depression, the bioregionalists call for a return to the land, a reconstruction of self-sufficient farm life, and a reverence toward the soil as the organic bond of human generations. As Ortega y Gasset’s revolt of the...
The Glory and the Myth of John Ford
A year ago, the University of Maryland held a special screening of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), followed by a two-hour discussion of the film led by representatives of the departments of history, English, philosophy, and communications. John Ford would have been publicly contemptuous of this attention from the egghead professors. In private, he probably would have been delighted. Ford...
Peri Bathous
From front cover to back, the total “package” of George Garrett’s new novel, Poison Pen, is a shuck and a con. No fictional work in recent memory is so elaborate a satire, and a reader would have to go back to the 18th-century Augustans to find its equal. To begin with, the jacket’s slick black stock and white lettering recall...
Shaker Design
In 1935 the Whitney Museum mounted the first comprehensive exhibit of Shaker artifacts, celebrating the simplicity and harmony of the Shaker artistic vision. This past summer, the Whitney opened a much more ambitious show of “Shaker Design,” later shown at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, from October through January. United Technologies Corporation, which is sponsoring “Shaker Design,”...
Bach at the Barricades
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as far as I can tell, people played only contemporary music. Since then, it seems, there has been a complete turnaround, and only contemporary music is not stylish. Beginning in the 18th century, interest in old music has developed gradually, erratically, but inexorably, despite some resistance from musicians and music-lovers. Throughout the 19th century,...
Senator From Nebraska
George Nash, the historian of post-World War II American conservatism, in a recent speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan called for a conservatism which would attempt to change the world as well as to understand it—a conservatism of politics as well as of scholarship. Conservatism, Nash declared, “must succeed in the arena of polities, not only in the realm of...
Letter From Minneapolis Criminal Chic
The gap between Middle Americans and our cultural elite is nowhere wider than on questions of crime and punishment. While activists on the bench and in academia have crafted ever more rights and privileges for those accused and even convicted of crimes, they have given short shrift to the rights and welfare of current and potential victims. In fact, prosecutors...
A Civic Proposal
The year 1986 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Mïes van der Rohe. Mr. Mïes (the plumage “van der Rohe” was invented by him well into his career) is considered by many to be the most influential architect of this century. Schooled in Germany before the First World War, he worked his way up in the 1920’s...
Media Metaphysics and Mid-Term Results
American elections are difficult enough to interpret in Presidential years. In by-election years, like 1986, political analyses assume the proportions of tea-leaf readings—or so television network analyses would seem to suggest. Faced with complex nonreductionistic information, the media resorted to metaphysical quick-fixes to explain complicated events. The U.S. Senate was recaptured by the Democratic Party, giving it control of both...
Paradise Enow: A Midwestern Perspective
This is not an invitation. Frankly, if you don’t live here already, most of us would rather you stay where you are, although we can’t blame you for wanting to come. Oh, some of our businessmen and bankers and ministers and mayors and tourism promoters might, in the prejudicial atmosphere of their workplaces, look down and mutter something about growth...
The Padre From Chicago
“He canonizes himself a Saint in his own lifetime.” —Samuel Butler Exhibitionism is a sin yet to be legitimized in Father Andrew Greeley’s ongoing excursion into soft porn (or those novels which he euphemistically christens his “comedies of grace”). But Greeley, the exhibitionist, is on full display in his venture into autobiography (or this book which he wrongly labels “confessional”)....
Raw Bits
Some undigested odds and ends this month. Let’s see—let’s start with some survey research on regional differences, real and perceived. From California comes word that the Stanford Research Institute has come up with a typology of Americans based on their (excuse the expression) life-styles. Not surprisingly, the types are not distributed uniformly across the U.S. Three in particular are geographically...
Pins in the Carpet
The Stratford Festival Theatre in Ontario has been training and cultivating great actors for years now—William Hutt, Maggie Smith, Brian Bedford, Marti Maraden, Alan Scarfe, and Martha Henry have all done beautiful work—probably some of their best—there. However, with the slight exception of Smith, none have made the transition to film. So to find Martha Henry starring in a new...
The Return of Professor X
In 1973, at the tag end of the riots and disruptions of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, he ventured into print with a small volume entitled This Beats Working for a Living: The Dark Secrets of a College Professor. He did this under the pseudonym “Professor X” not to hide his identity (this he readily admitted on national and...
Brown Shirts in the Ivory Tower
The orthodoxy of Reason is proclaimed, archconservative turned archliberal Garry Wills once wrote, and it will have its inquisitors. He ought to know. Wills perfectly represents a new breed of college Utopians who, losing their power to implement their latest brainstorms on a public suspicious of statist panaceas, have turned their collective energies inward, hoping to create an academic Eden...
School Daze
“A motive fair to Learning’s imps he gave. . . . “ —William Shenstone American education has never been in very good shape, so criticizing it now would be a redundancy, except for the fact that we are facing an increasing teacher shortage across the curricula and across all grade levels which shows no signs of abating. Concurrently, we are...
“I Keek It, I Vin It”
Two decades ago, the general managers of professional football teams discovered that the highly specialized jobs of placekicking could be done by sometime soccer players, most of them born and raised abroad. The placekicker, we remember, is often called upon to deliver a field goal whose three points, especially in the game’s concluding moments, can tilt the final score from...
The Grandfather With the Tear-Gas Foundation Pen
Hard by the railroad station at the Michigan town of Plymouth there stands a bungalow so huge as to be almost majestic, now a kennel for well-bred poodles. There I was born, in 1918. The house—which belonged to my grandfather, Frank Pierce—was one of the earliest of prefabricated dwellings, purchased from Sears, Roebuck, and Company, complete with bricks for the...
The Magnificent Tarkington
The Midwest is a lucky place for an American novelist to be from. Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser all made good money by holding up their native region to international ridicule, while Hemingway and Fitzgerald did even better by simply escaping to the East and eventually to Europe. Both, it is true, set some of their best short...
Censorship: When to Say No
Every Aprilsince1981theAmericanSocietyof journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. Theyroutinelytrotoutcopiesofchildren’sbookslikeAlicein Wonderland or Maty Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson ontolerating”errorofopinion,”andsomeprofessionallibrarianis suretowarnusthatiftheprudeshavetheirway,theywillsoon be removing copies of Shakespeare and the Bible from the library shelves. This year the New York City Library has chimed in...
Put Out No Flags
A former literary editor of The Spectator in London and currently touted as the new novelist of manners, A.N. Wilson was the author several seasons ago of a creditable biography of Hilaire Belloc. But the novels Wise Virgin (1983), Scandal (1984), and Gentlemen in England, just published in this country, remain chiefly responsible for his reputation on both sides of...
Marvelous Mestizaje: Religious Art From Latin America
“Gloria in Excelsis, The Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and Bolivia” richly deserved its title. This glorious exhibition at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York City exemplified the fascinating new styles of iconography that can result from cultural hybridization. In this case, the hybridization (mestizaje) was caused by European intrusion into the Indian (mostly Inca)...
Monologue as Echo Chamber
Tucked away in one of 2.3 Diary entries, Ned Rorem suggests that “inside every artist is a banker struggling to get out.” Though Rorem was merely penning another one of his inversions-for-inversion’s-sake, the particular aphorism he derived here seems curiously relevant to Spalding Gray. In his evolution (some would call it his “perfection”) of the “Me” monologue, Spalding Gray makes...
A Spymaster Defects
As a member of the last generation of English middle-class boys brought up on great expectations of prosperity, glamour, and power, John Le Carré first became famous in America when his obsession with the failed promise of his own society supplied an analogy for American middle-class readers jaded by the extravagant claims being made for theirs. Le Carré’s first well-known...
An Executive Fights Back
During the well-publicized oil crisis of the I970’s, populists looking for an easy answer to the problem of excruciatingly long lines at gas stations reflexively blamed the big oil companies. These barons of black gold were accused of bilking the public. So widespread was this sentiment that President Carter himself joined the chorus of blame. To many Americans it was...
The 62nd Annual Killdeer Mountain Rodeo Roundup
July 4. There’s a sad little cluster of peeling white bleachers, but they face the sun. Most locals elect to sit on a blanket on the hillside opposite, where the view is great in spite of the dust. To keep the blowing grit down, a tractor and sprayer work the arena to a perfect moistness; children in battered Stetsons and...
How to Get Along in the South: A Guide for Yankees
Right now, down here, we seem to be experiencing an influx of Northern migrants. There are so many of them, and misunderstanding is so frequent, that I fear a new wave of sectional hostility may be shaping up. I offer as evidence the fact that some of my less tolerant brethren have taken to referring to Northerners as “‘rhoids”—short for...
Empty Tomato Plot
So often the trouble with a play-turned-movie is that the screenwriter and director have fooled with the original too much—opened it up too much, added too many new characters and too many new scenes. In the case of William Mastrosimone’s Extremities, however, the problem lies in the fact that he and director Robert M. Young didn’t open it up enough....
Betrayed by Britain
“And hung my head and wept at Britain’s name.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge If there be monsters, they yawn from within. It is hard not to see justice in the story of an empire, brought low by its unwillingness to defend itself. “This book is in part a penance for unquestioningly accepting the Titoist bias shared by most of my countrymen,”...
The Right Kind of Spy
In these two recent spy thrillers, William F. Buckley’s CIA-trained alter ego makes his sixth and seventh appearances in a decade to play a winning hand in the high-stakes intrigue surrounding crucial moments in the Cold War. On a secret mission to Cuba (Project Alligator) aimed at exploring with Che Guevara possibilities for easing tensions between the two countries, Blackford...
Entrepreneurs and Bureaucrats
Despite his Viennese birth, Peter Drucker enjoys a reputation as a leading American social analyst, particularly on industrial and economic issues. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker interprets U.S. management theory and practice within the framework of the free market economy and the open society, as he seeks to define entrepreneurship as “a craft” essential for the vitality of the private...
Return of the Fairy Tale
The mass media have been particularly arid territory for children lately, treating our young as little more than vessels for advertising pitches. In fact, even theatrical films have become advertisement vehicles, as many of the recent releases aimed at children have been little more than blatant 90minute commercials hawking toy lines such as the Smurfs, the Care Bears, and the...
The Bureaucrat and the Shoe Salesman
“Among the many priests of Jove . . . all passed muster that could hide Their sloth, avarice, and pride.” —Bernard Mandeville Bruno Rizzi’s La Bureaucratisation du Monde, first published in Paris in 1939 and Part I of which is here translated by Adam Westoby into English for the first time, is the obscure work of an obscure man. A...
The Business of Business
Jefferson was of the opinion that the tree of liberty was not a hardy perennial that could be safely neglected. Once planted by a revolution, it needed to be periodically “refreshed by the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Jefferson’s radical vision of revolutionary violence was muted, in later years, by his conservative skepticism, but the two principles are not all...
More Money Than God
“How shameless and how greedy all these people are!” —Fyodor Dostoevsky Once there were three finance firms and then there were none. One was a Ponzi scheme, one a tax fraud, and the last was sold to American Express for $380 million. One CEO is broke and in jail; one is a wealthy fugitive from U.S. justice, living in Switzerland...
A New Bottom Line
In his provocative book Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver offered some poignant observations regarding modern times. Western man, he wrote, has fallen prey to a “falsified picture” of the world, characterized by materialism and an egotism which assumes that “man’s destiny in the world is not to perfect himself but to lean back in sensual enjoyment.” Like spoiled children, Weaver...
A Touch of Class
“The market may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade its heroisms, as well as war.” —John Ruskin We were two old parties, my visiting brother and I, sitting under the grape arbor at the end of a mild summer day. When I say “two old parties,” however, in the manner of Somerset Maugham, I do not...
Political Art and Artful Politics
We speak as readily of the art of politics as we do of the art of cooking or writing, and what we have in mind in each case is what the French call savoir faire. This sense of “art” claims excellence for the activity of which the term is predicated, and since to know what to do and how to...
The Un-Civil Liberties Union
When I undertook a study of the ACLU, I had no idea that the politics surrounding my investigation would prove to be as revealing as the research itself. Maybe more so. My first taste of the politics of the ACLU came during an interview with Aryeh Neier, past executive director of the ACLU. The interview lasted about 15 minutes. He...
Economic Ideology and the Conservative Dilemma
From Edmund Burke’s distrust of “sophisters, calculators and economists” to Calvin Coolidge’s boast that “the business of America is business” on to George Gilder’s “economy of heroes” has been a long journey that conservatism has not weathered well, either intellectually or politically. What was once a robust philosophy concerned with all of humane culture has been reduced to a few...
Sons of Jacob
“I pray you think you question with the Jew.” —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice The Jews Under Roman and Byzantine Rule has already appeared in German and Hebrew editions by the same polyglot author who has now produced the English translation. Avi-Yonah has mined Greek, Hebrew, and Latin sources and puts into his footnotes whatever space does not permit...
Dialogue of Self and Soul
Years ago, I was a different person. I looked different, thought differently, acted differently. And yet I am also the same person; there is no doubt in my mind that the “I” of, say, 10 years ago is fundamentally the same person as the one now writing this review. Evidently “I” cannot be identified neatly as this set of muscles...
Star Dreck
Cobra directed by George P. Cosmatos screenplay by Sylvester Stallone; Warner Bros. Sweet Liberty written and directed by Alan Alda. How did America’s movies ever get so bad? That seems to be the $99,000 question for American film critics lately, from Siskel and Ebert to American Film to New York Times critic Vincent Canby, right on down to your local...
Olaf Stapledon: Philosopher and Fabulist
The most widely known of Merseyside philosophers was never a full-time academic. But he gave classes for the Workers Educational Association from 1912, extra-mural lectures on philosophy from the 20’s, gained his Ph.D. in Liverpool in 1925 (in philosophical psychology), and was an active and famous philosopher till he died, in 1950. Olaf Stapledon was born a hundred years ago...
Speak the Word Only
Modern man often seems ill at ease. It is as if the world has been broken and the human community shattered into millions of charged particles, attracting or repelling each other in their chance meetings. Some such notion has threatened many of the best (and second best) minds of the past two centuries. For Hegelians, Marxians, and Freudians (among others),...
The Search For the Sacred
Religion is inseparable from the sacred, the channel through which the divine transcendent communicates with man, according to man’s sensate nature. Any object, natural or man-made—a Gothic cathedral or the lapis negra excavated on the Roman forum—may assume the character of sacredness. Through it, the divine communication becomes incarnated, and, in the intellectual-rational order, verities of the faith are better...
David Jones: The Last Liturgical Poet
The Welsh poet David Jones (1895-1974) wrote two of this century’s outstanding literary works, and yet neither a single line of his writing nor any mention of his name is included in so recent a collection as The Harper Anthology of Poetry (1981), an otherwise excellent volume of English and American verse edited by the poet-translator John Frederick Nims. Anthologies...