Revolutions attempt to give new meaning to life. Sometimes changing the definition of words is part of the attempt to change reality. At other times, reality changes first. Nowhere does the traveler have more old words with new meanings than in revolutionary Nicaragua. To help those whose first days in the country are as confused as mine, here is an...
On ‘Old Adam, New Eve’
Thomas Fleming’s article, “Old Adam, New Eve” (Perspective, June 1986) failed to mention the women in the line of fire between feminists and traditionalists. Sure, we all decry militant feminists who want to turn science, the sexes, art and, indeed, all society into a progressive’s hodgepodge of leftist doctrine and Marxist utopia. But what about us hybrids? As a single...
The Celts of the West
The ancient story of early Scotland will not be fully told until much more study has been completed, The face of the land literally is pockmarked with the remains of settlements and dwellings—many unexcavated—raised in an age so remote from our own, we scarcely know the names of the races that inhabited them. Riddles there are in abundance; answers to...
And the Kennedy KGB Handed Out Hot Soup
It was now the beginning of the seventh year of the genocidal invasion of Afghanistan. To many Americans it appeared that the war would never end, not until the entire population of Afghanistan was either dead or in exile. Some Americans thought it was time to do something about Soviet imperialism, especially since a good many of them had spent...
Germania Tremens
“What wonders I have done, all Germany can witness. . . . “ —Christopher Marlowe Anyone who has lived in Germany eventually realizes that Germany is a nation of hypochondriacs. Germans spend far more than Americans on nostrums, vitamins, tranquilizers, and elixers; Americans may watch “Dynasty,” but the most popular TV show in the Federal Republic is “Black Forest Clinic.”...
Telling Stories Out of School
It was E.G. Wodehouse, I think, who once told an anxious would-be writer of fiction that literary success was the result of careful adherence to a few very simple rules. Find a desk, Wodehouse suggested, and stock its drawers with sharp pencils and plenty of paper. Pull up a chair. Then, “Put your bum on the chair. And keep it...
Epigones of the Lost Generation
Near the end of this fine book, John Aldridge observes: “The history of the period from 1890, roughly, to 1940 might . . . have been the history of the disappearance of the novel as an art form in society. . . . Yet there has seldom if ever been a time when more novels of distinction as well as...
The Mafioso
According to some theorists, most of America’s woes began with the arrival of big government in 1932. Before that time, so the story goes, liberty was the rule, the work ethic was alive and well, God was in the classroom, and all was well with the world. As with all ideologies, this one presents an incomplete picture of reality. Organized...
Rendering Unto Caesar
“Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: ‘Ireland shall get her beedom and you shall break stone.'” —W. Yeats That some Protestant theologians meshed Christianity with Nazism and became ardent supporters of Hider should surprise no one familiar with the activities of theologians who support a Marxist-Leninism dedicated to destruction of religion. Robert Ericksen focuses upon...
Big Brother Sits for a Portrait
“It is highly desirable that people heading the party movement, be, at last, depicted in powerful Rembrandt colors in all their robust vitality.” —K. Marx What Khrushchev in his secret speech at the Congress of the Soviet Communist Party called “Stalin’s cult of personality” is, in fact, the most common and the most stable component of totalitarianism—the cult of the...
Graveyard Vigil
Probably the most moving event of my year in Poland so far was my visit to the Powazki Cemetery on the evening of All Saints. It is an old cemetery, with nothing like it that I know of in America. Indeed, the most similar I can recall is found in Maple Grove, the old cemetery in Russellville, Kentucky (north of...
Save the Children
Suddenly, we may receive a son—a six-year-old, our first child—and we may get him in weeks. My small worries grow immense. Some background on one of them: My husband and I have what has been called a “mixed marriage” (sort of a hot dish, like franks and beans). He is firmly Catholic; I, by upbringing, Protestant: a lukewarm Presbyterian, dropped...
Journalists and Other Turncoats
America’s journalists enjoyed their finest hour during Vietnam—indulging in reporting that overwhelmed all objective presentation of American military action. A recent book about Robert Garwood by two former reporters for the Washington Star suggests that our newspapermen are not done yet. Marine Private First Class Robert Garwood, captured by the Vietcong in 1963 and released by his North Vietnamese masters...
Letters From Tocqueville
“I am rich in letters. . . . “ —Horace Walpole Alexis de Tocqueville was an immensely prolific writer. His friend Gustave de Beaumont wrote that “for one volume he published he wrote ten; and the notes he cast aside as intended only for himself would have served many writers as text for the printer.” The publication of his collected...
A Mississippi Homecoming
Chauvinistic Southerners like me are hard to please. We don’t like it when visitors pop in and out and say that the South has changed so much that it looks like everywhere else; but we don’t like it when folks come calling and say that nothing important has changed, either. In a recent article in The American Spectator, an expatriate...
Ground Zero, 1950
In December 1950, at the Nellis Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas, the Atomic Energy Commission set off the first atomic bomb since Nagasaki. The year before, the Soviets had conducted their first atomic test—an unpleasant surprise to most Americans—and Mao had taken over China. Truman announced in January of ’50 that he was directing the AEC to start...
The War Against the West
“Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.” —Tennyson In our day the mere mention of imperialism is enough to provoke paroxysms of moral outrage. Except in derision, no one any longer dares to speak of the white man’s burden, and few possess the courage to say that it was Europeans who created the greatest civilization yet known...
The Evil That Men Don’t Do: Joe McCarthy and the American Right
His is probably the most hated name in American history. Other villains—Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—today evoke merely the esoteric passions of the antiquarian or the interminable controversies of partisans. Only Joe McCarthy has given his name to an enduring term of political abuse, and in American politics today there is literally no one who...
The Unseen Caravaggio
I went to the Caravaggio exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a rainy Tuesday morning, hoping to avoid the crowds that gather at big name art events these days. The streets were fairly empty, and I could feel the temperature drop along the line of fountains as I passed—a cozy moment before moving from nature into art. I...
Modern Conservatism and the Burden of Joe McCarthy
Many political experts have attempted to explain the rise of the right in recent years. At the close of World War II there was no unified, articulate conservative movement in the United States. Forty years later, Ronald Reagan was serving his second term in the White House, scores of conservative organizations were wealthy and growing, conservative publications flourished, and the...
Short Views
Some people love to go to Washington. The sight of so much power and wealth is exhilarating, especially for young conservative writers who discover that their names are recognized on the Hill. For many, however, the reaction is just the reverse. Within a few hours they are mulling over certain scriptural passages in Eliot—”Oh my people . . . ”...
Going Back to Charleston
The United States were once precisely that, a union of unique and independent states—each making its own literary and intellectual contribution to the national experience. Of these states, none was so peculiar as South Carolina, and for much of its intellectual history, South Carolina was Charleston. In the generation before The War, Charleston was in the process of becoming something...
On ‘Naming the Bard’
In light of your criticisms of education, higher and lower, the question arises, why should Chronicles writer Jane Greer (February issue) and Joseph Sobran of the National Review be taken in by the anti-Shakespearean nonsense? Are they untaught? Badly taught? Or are their views a relatively harmless manifestation of the paranoia of the times? Once someone allows the thought to...
Temporizing on the Thames
It is one of the chief distinguishing features of the philistine that he thinks himself, above all things, “openminded.” While the converse of this proposition is untrue, modern culture having witnessed an explosion in the doctrinaire varieties of philistinism, it is nevertheless a fact that the trueblue, classic philistine, of the kind described by the Russian word obyvatel’, who has...
Ez and Old VORT
Among Wyndham Lewis’ nearly 50 books are found such classics as Time and Western Man (1927) and the novels Tarr (1918), The Apes of God (1930), and The Revenge For Love (1937). But at the time of his death in 1957, Lewis was probably better known for his persona than for his writings or the brilliant paintings and drawings that...
Without a Barrel
Thundering through the Falls of Niagara is the overflow of all the Great Lakes except Lake Ontario. The combined waterpower of Horseshoe Falls and American Falls has been estimated at some four million horsepower. Both Falls drop more than 150 feet; their combined width is nearly four-fifths of a mile. Even Oscar Wilde, like Sarah Bernhardt before him, was persuaded...
Madman in the Dock
When John Hinckley was acquitted in 1982 for his attempted assassination of the President, the verdict galvanized opposition to the insanity defense. Some lawmakers wanted to restrict the use of the defense or even abolish it altogether. In Crime and Madness Thomas Maeder places the insanity defense and the recent challenges to it in historical perspective. Outrage over the Hinckley...
On Genetic Determinism and Morality
In his recent speech to Congress, Anatoly Shcharansky said, “All understanding between the East and West must be based on human values common to all men.” This appealing statement takes us straight to the central question of moral reasoning: What, if anything, are common human values? Humanity is and always has been faced with a choice among three metaethics, three...
Growing Cotton and Communism on the Mexican Stage
When a killer quake ripped through Mexico City last September, it crippled the young theater season then taking shape. In the aftermath of the national tragedy, playhouses went dark for a fortnight. Actors were idled and unpaid, and playgoers turned for sustenance to motion pictures and television drama. But the theater, fabulous invalid that it is, managed to struggle to...
A Cultural Evening in Grenada
During the four-and-one-half years of Cuban hegemony in Grenada, I often had cause to cross a country road from my house on the Pointe Salines peninsula to the Headquarters of the DGI (Directorio General de Intelegencia) to complain about the noise. Would they please turn down the altavoz or speaker system beaming Castro’s speeches at the empty West Indian countryside?...
Will They Still Love Us Tomorrow?
L. and M. and their two blond preschool sons have escaped, after years of stealthy planning and saving and months of waiting. Not the gaunt East European urchins we expect, they step off the plane as if from the pages of Family Circle, self-conscious in our applause, the little boys in Velcro sneakers, M. movie-star pretty, L. grinning, gregarious, protective,...
The Federal Government and Federal Express
Why do agencies of the U.S. government make such heavy use of Federal Express? No, that’s not a riddle. It’s a serious question. I have been dealing with a number of Federal bureaucrats—never mind why—and it seems that almost invariably they communicate by Federal Express. Next day service, too, not the cheaper 48-hour rate. Has anyone else noticed this? Hands...
Faith and Empathy
“Well, I do believe some things, of course . . . and therefore, of course, I don’t believe other things.” —G.K. Chesterton, The Incredulity of Father Brown The progressive turning away from belief in God that characterized Western intellectuals during the 19th century continues, alas, in the 20th. This intellectual shift has often been attributed to the triumphs of science...
Not a Prayer
“(Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon . . . “ —Samuel Taylor Coleridge Individualism is the question of first concern to the future of the West. The dread argument of the individual case is, I think, the fundamental idea of modernism. Books like those by Turner and Bellah & Associates which deal with this...
Bashing the Baptists
“Who are these people?” someone asks about evangelicals in the early pages of Redemptorama, a book billed as an exploration of Christ and contemporary culture. Despite years of research and her own Southern Baptist upbringing, the author, Carol Flake, offers only caricatures in response to the question. The book is supposed to help sophisticates bewildered and appalled that evangelicals still...
Nailing Mailer
In 1979 Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize and earned a small fortune with his sympathetic portrayal of murderer Gary Gilmore. Entitled The Executioner’s Song, Mailer’s book devoted 1,050 pages to the last days of the two-time murderer, and only 18 pages to the victims. A year later, 22-year-old Eric Kaminsky, a promising young musician, was mugged, slashed through the...
Us and Them
American diplomats, foreign policy experts, and politicians desperately want to believe that the Soviet leaders are essentially like us and that, fundamentally, they want the same things as we do. The Soviets encourage this kind of thinking with their proposals for disarmament, trade, and detente, and with their laments over the madness of the current arms race and the millions...
Closing the Campus Frontier
The recent drop in the price of oil has been welcome indeed to most Americans, for it portends a boost of epic proportions for the economy. However, the blessings of cheap petroleum do not fall evenly across the land. In Texas and Oklahoma, as in other oil-producing states, the drop from $40 to $15 a barrel has brought a budget...
Lame Hands of Socialist Faith
“You . . . have been borrowing goblins from the capitalist. . . . “ —John Ruskin For numerous well-known Western intellectuals, capitalism versus socialism remains the great dilemma, the principal philosophical and institutional alternative of our times. It is far from self-evident why this should be the case. Why not political pluralism as opposed to regimentation? Or democracy versus...
Pleasant Words & Ugly Books
“Then shall I dare these real ills to hide In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?” —George Crabbe English must be kept up. It rarely is. But what a splendid collection of offenses against it is in D.J. Enright’s book of euphemism. Those who delight in the instructions for Japanese small appliances will here encounter the ultimate in linguistic self-destruction. Here...
The Virgin and the Paparazzo
The battle lines are drawn. On one side, Pope John Paul II and the French National Federation of Catholic Family Relations, along with numerous religious groups in this country. On the other, the American media, including New York magazine, the New York Times, Gannett newspapers, and many, many more. The issue: Abortion? Nuclear weapons? Return to the Latin Mass? Liberation...
Monkeys and Machine-Guns: Evolution, Darwinism, and Christianity
It often happens that when a Greek or Latin word is given a new lease on life in one of the major modern languages, and especially in English, the original meaning of the word may be replaced by a rather different one. This is particularly the case when a word, which was a strongly transitive verb in the classical context,...
Journalists and Other Anthropoids
It is over 60 years since the Scopes Trial attracted journalists like Henry Mencken and Joseph Wood Krutch to Dayton, Tennessee, and yet the teaching of evolution is once again as controversial as—it was in 1925. Most of the debate is carried out between militant fundamentalists and equally militant materialists. While most of the fundamentalists stop short of believing that...
Selling the Farm: Country Music in the 80’s
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. For 30 years country music has alternately ignored and embraced that small truth, always bouncing between the apparent threat of extinction and last-minute rescue. And now, after a decade of “evolution” and “transition,” the country music industry again is surprised that the real thing was good enough all along; that, indeed, the real...
Letter From the Lower Right Poetic Gems
Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer— She never was much given to literature.” . . . Thus, South Carolina’s J. Gordon Coogler—“the last bard of Dixie, at least in the legitimate line,” as H.L. Mencken put it in his scathing essay “Sahara of the Bozart.” Mencken’s essay has by now introduced several generations of readers to the...
The Re-Possessed
“In the end I shall have to renounce optimism.” —Voltaire Among other, more profound things, Dostoevski’s anti-revolutionary novel, The Possessed, is a withering dissection of liberal intellectuals. In its pages, liberals parade as hostile and irresponsible critics of a society that affords most of them a life of comfort and status. They are the “fathers” of those nihilist sons who...
California Monologue
Author of one previous history of the American West, Richard Batman has attempted in The Outer Coast to provide a history of foreigners in California from the founding of the first mission in 1769 until the attempted annexation of Monterey by a drunken American Navy captain in 1842, which, in Batman’s eyes, marked the end of California’s isolation from the...
Disintering Détente
The Soviet Union has reached the peak of its military power by reducing its economy to a shambles. If it continues to lavish its resources on the military, the economy will further decline, eventually imperiling the military budget. If the Soviets shift investment to the civilian economy, less money will remain for guns. If the Politburo permits significant economic reform...
The Maze of Metaphor
Jacques Derrida has in recent years made himself one of the most influential figures in literary criticism on American college campuses. The movement he has inspired, alternately known as “deconstruction” or “poststructuralism,” asserts that all language is metaphorical and that there is nothing outside the literary text. Following Derrida’s lead, Joseph G. Kronick challenges the traditional concepts of literary history...
Fruitless Grain
The great American story for at least 100 years has been a tale like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux”: the rube who comes to the city and loses his innocence. Like Jack in the fairy tale, we are eager to trade in the family cow for a chance to get fabulous wealth. The change...