The trial of 12 sanctuary workers in Tucson has heated up an issue which is being hailed in many quarters as the great moral issue of the 1980’s. The movement, whose members provide protection to illegal immigrants from Central America, is protesting the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s refusal to recognize Salvadoran and Guatemalan emigrants as political refugees. Taking matters...
Zeus, Whoever He Is
Walter Burkert may be the world’s leading authority on the religion of the ancient Greeks. Like several predecessors in the field—notably Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Otto—Burkert writes almost as an enthusiast. In a series of important works, he has paid the Greeks the very high courtesy of taking them seriously. Burkert is a sort of high church sacramentalist on the...
War, Peace, and the Church’s Teaching
The amazing thing about the nuclear debate and the Catholic bishops’ participation in it is that the accumulated wisdom and experience of mankind, as well as the Church’s pronouncements on peace and war, are so completely ignored. This is quite a natural phenomenon on the part of so many lay debaters: it belongs also to mankind’s experience that in every...
The Atonement of Poetry
“Aye, those fair living forms swam heavenly / To tunes forgotten. . . . “ —John Keats One of life’s great joys is to come across a new work of literature that is likely to last far beyond any early assessment of its value. In the case of poetry, which chiefly concerns us here, it is to have known at...
On “Marxism & Motorcycle Maintenance”
Rather than answer Thomas Ashton point-by-point, I prefer to wear his critique (Chronicles, November 1985) as a badge of honor. I am struck, in the history of people and ideas, by the frequency of the distinction between personalities and their thoughts. The Rousseau of The Confessions and the Rousseau of The Discourse on Inequality being perhaps the classic case. Civility...
On “Animals and ‘Other Awkward Cases'”
In his review of recent books by Bernard Rollin and Mary Midgley (Chronicles, August 1985), Jay Mechling astutely presents some of the strengths and weaknesses in the current debate over animal rights. Thus Mary Midgley’s case for kinship and moral community in preference to the. inbuilt limitations of the utilitarian standpoint presents as not merely philosophically sound, but as in...
Life, Interpreted Lucely
” . . . where the pictures for the page atone.” —Alexander Pope No contemporary could write promotion copy quite like Henry Luce. His 1936 prospectus for a new magazine featuring photographs, tentatively called The Show-Book of the World, still has few equals: To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the...
Socialism Sanctified
Dale Vree begins his book by recounting the experiences in the radical 60’s that led him to leave Berkeley and sample life in the “worker’s paradise” of East Berlin. Such a decision makes Vree seem admirable: at least he did not begin by demanding radical changes in American society and end by indulging in radical decadence and selfishness, as many...
Wet Cement
Iain Banks’s first novel invites comparison with the work of Ian McEwan. During the mid-1970’s, McEwan began to establish himself as one of Britain’s most successful writers of fiction. First Love, Last Rites—his first collection of short stories—sold unusually well and won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award. The Cement Garden, his first novel, was widely and on the whole very...
A Woman’s Dreams
“Most women have no Characters at all,” wrote Alexander Pope: “Good as well as ill, / Woman’s at best a Contradiction still.” The contradiction of womanhood will perhaps never be fully solved, but it has generally been considered manageable within marriage and family. Outside of the home, women are . . . well, we’ve made no progress since Pope. We’re...
On the Waterfront
Singin’ in the Rain, now playing in New York, is wonderful fun and a witty commentary on the world of Hollywood musicals. Unfortunately, the main focus of the plot—Don Lockwood’s romantic interest in sweetnatured Kathy Selden—is weak. Lina Lamont, the blond bombshell who most definitely “ain’t dumb,” steals the show completely. I kept hoping for a miraculous twist in the...
Worms in the Big Apple
The title of this book is misleading. Karen Gerard’s subject is one city. New York, and the “scenes” she discusses are random sketches of New York’s political, economic, and cultural life. Gerard, former deputy mayor of New York under Edward Koch, writes like a politician: her style is largely anecdotal, and the book meanders tourist-like on the fringes of economic...
Still In Saigon—In My Mind
“The earth outside is covered with snow and I am covered with sweat. My younger brother calls me a killer and my daddy calls me a vet.” So the Vietnam veteran appears in a popular song recorded a few years back by Charlie Daniels (written by Dan Daley). The Vietnam War is over, but the matter is not settled in...
Teenagers and Lower Forms of Life
While Teen Wolf was opening this past summer in 1,500 theaters. Kiss of the Spider Woman found only 15 receptive movie houses. This may seem odd, given that Teen Wolf is a formula flick, a werewolf comedy in which Lon Chancy Jr. would’ve felt at home, while Kiss of the Spider Woman is “Cinema” writ large, with William Hurt in...
Erratic Entrepreneurs
Writers of worthwhile biographies must not only research their facts carefully, they must also highlight the moral, imaginative, or philosophic significance of their subjects’ lives. Both James Grant’s Bernard Baruch and Stanley Jackson’s J.P. Morgan are well researched and clearly written, but both fail to tell us why we should care about either of these two idiosyncratic businessmen. Baruch’s transformation...
Gatsby Without Clothes
“O money, money! . . . Thou art the test of beauty, the judge of ornament, the guide of fancy, the index of temper, and the pole star of the affections.” —Daniel Defoe It is an odd thing for someone who has written an approving book on Peter DeVries and who also has testified in court against pornography to find...
The American “Collective” (Day)Dream
“Some races increase, others are reduced, and in a short while the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners relay the torch of life.” —Lucretius Reading student applications for scholarships, as I have done on and off now for a dozen years on the undergraduate scholarships committee of the University of California, Davis, has some of the qualities...
Food for Thought
One of the dumber remarks of the 1984 Presidential campaign—a campaign notable for its dumb remarks—came from Joe Frank Harris, governor of Georgia. Asked if he approved of Geraldine Ferraro, he replied: “Yes. I asked her if she had eaten grits and liked them, and she said, ‘Yes’—and she passed the test.” He should have asked if she knew what...
The Costs of Culture
“The choice of a point of view is the initial act of culture.” —Ortega y Gasset Because I have spoken sharply to the general question of Federal support for arts and letters, and because my name is connected with certain facets of the public business, I receive through the mails a mass of publications designed to justify past or projected...
Brezhnev and Beyond
Perhaps it is inevitable that the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa (already dubbed the “Bo Derek of the Steppes” in a British press report) will come to the United States. If Secretary Gorbachev does visit, the journalists and commentators who report the visit should be required to read The Brezhnev Politburo and the Decline of Detente...
Old Dutch Buggies & New Asian Shrimp Boats
Both Witness and Alamo Bay explore the tensions that arise when dissimilar cultures meet, when people must meet the demands of an alien land. In Witness, a streetwise Philadelphia homicide detective, hardened by a climate of violence and corruption, must hide out among the peaceful Amish of rural Pennsylvania Dutch country. In Alamo Bay, a group of Vietnamese refugees flees...
The Man Who Loved Birds
“I drew, I looked upon nature only; my days were happy beyond human conception.” John James Audubon, who wrote these words, was born 200 years ago in Les Cayes, Haiti. To this day, he remains unrivaled as the greatest painter of birds, with the possible exception of Edward Lear (1812-1888). Unlike Audubon, though, Lear painted birds only for a short...
So Long, St. George
This collection, announces Franz Rottensteiner in his introduction, gives us none of the traditional “high” fantasy of heroic quests in imaginary lands, filled with magic and sorcery and pitting good against evil. Such fantasy, Rottensteiner argues, can provide little insight into modern society or the human mind because it is rooted in past worlds divorced from the peculiar stress and...
All Gone in Search of America
What does it mean to be an American? Major debates over legislation and proposed constitutional amendments raise the question. Without stretching a point too much, it is easy to see the American identity as the underlying question on the immigration issue, the Equal Rights. Amendment, and perhaps even in the debate over abortion. It comes out very clear in discussion...
Henry James at the Sacred Fount
It has long been self-evident that Henry James was thoroughly apolitical in any practical sense of the term. He did not involve himself in public affairs as such and hardly took more than passing notice of the Civil War, even though his two younger brothers, Wilkinson and Robertson James, served with distinguished records in the Union Army. Roughly a half...
Between Auschwitz and Armageddon
“Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for ever?” —Zechariah Most nations know all too clearly what they believe about Jews. Americans are less sure. This beneficial uncertainty inheres in the two major traditions that shape American souls: Christianity and modern political philosophy. Peter Grose writes that the Puritans “identified with the people of the Old...
On “Transports of Power”
The article by Momcilo Selic on Milovan Djilas (Chronicles, September 1985) is a piece of rare quality. The language has the descriptive power of poetry while still obeying the discipline of knowledge. The author can convey the Montenegrin atmosphere to us outsiders and thus throw light on the enigmatic figure of Djilas. My chief praise, however, is that the piece...
On “Leave the Kids Alone”
I read with interest your essay “Leave the Kids Alone” in the September issue of Chronicles. Concerning prayer in public schools, I wonder whether the dispute might be less a question of “religious liberty” than of “thought control.” I have therefore devised an inexpensive experiment which might clarify the issues. The problem is that many of those parents who are...
More Than Monkey Business
Human beings are alternately ashamed and amused by the spectacle of their closest connections on the scala naturae. Behavior that we find unremarkable in dogs and cats—sexual promiscuity or self-abuse—seems grotesque in chimpanzees and baboons. Looking at apes and monkeys in the zoo is a little too much like looking at ourselves in a fun-house mirror. We begin to wonder...
Laborious Hedonism
In America, speaking out against work was once like saying nasty things about motherhood. Even now that attacks on motherhood have become common. Perry Pascarella makes it clear in The New Achievers that work is still sacred to the yuppie mentality. No longer, however, is work the spiritual exercise it was in Calvinism; restraining the corrupt desires of a fallen...
Black and White—and Red All Over
Don’t look for it at the corner news stand or in the promotionals from Publisher’s Clearing House. Except for professional Soviet watchers, few Americans even know of the existence of Culture and Life, an “illustrated monthly magazine of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries,” published in English, Russian, French, Spanish, and German at...
Dead Cows and Mangled Translations
Fyodor Abramov was awarded the State Prize of the U.S.S.R. in 1975 for his trilogy of life on a rural commune, The Pryaslins, of which Two Winters and Three Summers is the second volume. “Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop,” was the King’s advice to Alice, but Harcourt Brace Jovanovich prefers to start in the...
They Were the World
Most people are unconcerned about the plight of the very poor because they have their hands quite full enough providing for the health and safety of their own families. But then there are “the fashionably concerned,” those who are very concerned that they appear concerned about the poor. One thinks of certain entertainment personalities, religious leaders, and (of course) academics....
The Cult of Personality
The life of Roland Barthes will never be serialized on Masterpiece Theater. Born in 1915, he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis as a young man (1934), and spent part of his life in sanatoriums. Barthes’s education was conventional enough: he received a license in the classics from the Sorbonne, participated in the foundation of the Groupe de Théatre Antique, and achieved a graduate...
The “News: From Moscow
The analysis of dezinformatsia here provided by Richard Shultz and Roy Godson is overloaded with scholarly paraphernalia, ranging from statistical tables of Soviet “overt propaganda themes” to an erratic glossary containing a pompous and unnecessary definition of “forgery” (“Forgery, one of many disinformation techniques, is the use of authentic-looking but false documents and communiques”). Because of a zeal to appear...
A Vibrant Voice
Voice, it is called: that quality of certain poets’ accumulated poems which stamps their singular metrics or syntax or vocabulary onto our personal sound system. Voice makes us unconsciously imitate the music of a good poet we’ve been studying. Voice lets us recognize the author without peeking at the cover. Now, it’s true that every second slim little poetry volume...
Time and the Cross
“[They] assemble before daylight and recite by turns a form of words to Christ as god. I discovered nothing else than a perverse and extravagant superstition.” –Pliny the Younger The New Testament is not a book. In common with the Old Testament, to which it can in some ways be regarded as an appendix, like the Apocrypha, it is a library. It...
Letter From the Lower Right
To begin with, an anniversary: September 20th of this year marked a decade since the death of Alabama Representative Ray Burgess. The Honarable Ray, described at the time of his death by the New York Times as “a volatile segregationist and sometimes [sic] lay preacher,” had a habit of bringing his pistol onto the floor of the Alabama House of...
A Survivor…So Far
“When another blames or hates you, or when men say injurious things about you, approach their poor souls . . . and see what kind of men they are.” – Marcus Aurelius In 1944 Viktor Kravchenko defected from the Soviet Union and wrote a now obscure book, I Chose Freedom, published in 1946. “I was to learn slowly and incredulously,” he...
Marxism and Its Guardian
“Long promise and short observance is the road that leads to the sure triumph.” – Dante Inequality under socialism—or under putative socialism—remains largely unknown and barely under stood in the West even by the educated public. If by now the political practices of countries insisting on being called socialist (sometimes even democratic) are better grasped, the same cannot be said...
Stray Nuts & Bolts
Using the backdrop of a small Southern town slowly awakening to the cultural and social rumblings of the mid and late 20th century, Jayne Anne Phillips is attempting in this novel to weave the lives, dreams, and remembrances of the Hampson clan of Bellington, West Virginia, into a mythic mosaic of the sort found in Faulkner. Written with a sharp...
Letter From Washington
We Americans are optimists. As people of goodwill and great intentions, we find it difficult to comprehend a system of government or a political philosophy that has no place for decency or compassion. From time to time, however, something happens that makes us face the facts of international life. Solzhenitsyn writes The Gulag Archipelago. Korean Airlines’ flight 007 is shot...
The Celebration of Chagall
Whimsy—clumsy or fantastic—fills the minds of those viewing the art of Marc Chagall. Two hundred oil paintings, gouaches, etchings, stained glass, and theater designs, chosen for their quality and their significance in the artist’s career, drawn from public and private collections throughout the world (including generous loans from the artist’s family), were on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art...
La Vie en Rouge
The sins of South Africa are once again heavy on the American conscience. The flaws and contradictions built into her multiracial social organization are subjected to the most minute scrutiny and the imperfections in her “human rights” record are held up as justification for revolutionary forces that would cheerfully slaughter the European population of Africa’s only state with a thriving...
Marxism & Motorcycle Maintenance
“The revolutionary loves a man who does not yet exist.’’ – Albert Camus In recent years, critics of culture have given the imagination a one way ticket to the left. The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling is followed by The Radical Imagination by Irving Howe, which is followed in turn by The Sociological Imagination of C. Wright Mills. The imagination,...
Russia’s Bloody Gold
“Lasciate ogni speranza” —Inferno, by Dante Alighieri The history of gold mining in Russia—a record of the greatest abuses of human rights ever perpetrated—has seldom been told. The use of slave labor in state-owned Russian mines goes back to the 19th century, when Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian patriots who rebelled against Russian occupation were put to work mining gold while...
Who Will Censor the Censors?
Who will censor the censors? That is a question asked increasingly by librarians and other defenders of pornography in the United States. At the University of Wisconsin, at least, we know the answer: it is the Board of Regents, who recently ordered the Union Council (a predominantly student or ganization) at the Madison campus to return Playboy, Playgirl, and Pent house...
Affirmative Action in the Arts
Affirmative Action Art is all the rage in California. Recently, the California Arts Council decided that, because of ”social conditions which have historically denied some groups access to the mainstream and . . . complicated patterns of cultural bias,” race-blind awarding procedures were no longer adequate. A new “cultural outreach” was called for with hundreds of thousands of dollars especially...
Perversion of the Law
“Perversion of the law” took on new meaning recently when homosexual groups forced Georgetown University—a Catholic school—to grant them official recognition. In a 2-to-1 decision handed down with the unusual stipulation that the case must be reargued before a full appeals court, a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling and declared...
The Cultural Alienation of the Press
The cultural alienation of the press was recently seen in its least flattering light, when the Associated Press distributed a picture of a grief-stricken father beside the body of his drowned five-year-old son. Originally published in the Bakersfield Californian, the picture provoked a storm of local outrage: within two days 500 people had called to protest the paper’s exploitation of...