ABC launched Call to Glory with an heroic promotional effort during the Summer Olympics. The series, which chronicles the life of a reconnaissance pilot and his family in the early 1960’s, is frequently described as unabashedly pro-American. Obviously, ABC hoped to cash in on the “New Patriotism” generated by the games. The show was an over night success as millions...
American Proscenium (Part 3)
Richard Brautigan was a familiar American type that has been with us since the days of the Yankee peddler: the self-appointed Job who wants to take on the powers that be from his chair behind the cracker barrel, the freshman who writes a history of the world without a bibliography, the guttersnipe journalist who runs the risk of becoming rich...
American Proscenium (Part 4)
Cleanth Brooks has been named the 1985 Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mr. Brooks, who is best known for his works of literary theory and his expositions of William Faulkner, is one of the last of the band of prophets who found themselves at Vanderbilt University in the l 920’s. Too young to contribute to I’ll...
Revisions – Socinian Socialism
The worst thing that can happen to most idealists is to realize their ideals: they have no one to blame the consequences on–except themselves. This is the figure Michael Harrington cuts in The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization (New York; Holt, Rinehart & Winston). As a “democratic Marxist” and atheist, Harrington realizes that he is part...
Typefaces – Pulpits and the Press
“The grand Pulpit is now the Press,” Thomas Carlyle argued a century and a half ago, adding that “the true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of its Newspapers. These preach to the people daily, weekly; admonishing kings themselves; advising peace or war, with an authority which only the first Reformers, and a long past clan...
Church +/- State (Part 1)
In writing The Naked Public Square, Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor, was undoubtedly conscious of Lutheranism’s potentially central role in mediating the religious-moral battles now so conspicuous on the American scene. Liturgical and dogmatic, yet firmly evangelical, mainstream in some of its American manifestations and quasi-sectarian in others, running the gamut from the most sophisticated theology to simple pietism, Lutheranism perhaps...
A Prudent Progressive
When I first came to these shores, almost 20 years ago, an escapee from communism’s lethal embrace, a sort of antiwar was raging here. I felt betrayed. As anyone who lived under the most intricate tyranny of mind and body, I believed it every free man’s sacrosanct duty to combat communism’s reptile stranglehold on truth and humanness with every means...
Polemics & Exchanges
On Seeing Red, by Roy Traband Red Dawn is not a particularly good flick, as we used to call motion pictures in my day. But your reviewer misses some of the underlying reasons for its immense success. To resist Afghanistani style is also unfathomable to the New Elite Red Guard in Media. Eric Hoffer, the late SF forklift philosopher, and...
European Anti-Americanism: Nothing New on the Western Front
I visited Western Europe recently to learn more about the critical attitudes of intellectuals and other opinion makers (primarily academics and journalists) toward the United States. I was especially interested in how such European critiques resembled those produced by American intellectuals. I also wanted lo learn something about the connections between animosity toward the U.S. and the social-critical impulses of...
Screen – A Film Vacuum
Falling in Love, Directed by Ulu Grosbard; Written by Michael Cristofer; Paramount Pictures. Anyone who believes that an actor or an actress “makes” a film should sit through Falling in Love. Twice. Once for Robert De Niro. Once for Meryl Streep. Those two, certainly, are among the finest American players in the cinema. De Niro, whose eyes can shift from laughter to...
In Focus – Say A Little Prayer
George Goldberg; Reconstructing America; Wm. B. Eedernabs; Grand Rapids, MI. Many years ago Leo Strauss remarked that the Supreme Court is more likely to defer to the contentions of social science than to the Ten Commandments as the words of the living God. Strauss was, of course, basing his observation on the use of social science in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954,...
In Focus – Embattled Preacher
Dinesh D’Souza: Falwell, Before the Millennium; Regnery Gateway; Chicago. The Rev. Jerry Falwell is one of the most frequently pilloried men in America today. Journalists and liberal politicians are fond of comparing him to Hitler, Khomeini, and Jim Jones and brand him a “racist,” “fascist,” and “intolerant bigot.” Ultrafundamentalists like Bob Jones denounce him as a “heretic” and “apostate.” Readers...
In Focus – Media Quislings
James L. Tyson: Target America: The Influence of Communist Propaganda on the U.S. Media; Regnery Gateway; Chicago. Most Americans understand that “news” from Tass is about as reliable as promises from real-estate speculators. Both are capable of paving swampland with hyperbole. What relatively few of us realize, however, is to what extent American news reports are swayed by procommunist attitudes. James L....
In Focus – God and Men at Hillsdale
The Christian Vision: Man in Society; Edited by Lynne Morris; The Hillsdale College Press; Hillsdale, MI. “Where there is no vision,” says Proverbs, “the people perish.” Because the vision provided by Judeo-Christianity has been fading for some time on America’s campuses, college graduates informed by a sense of purpose and meaning have become rare. As Stephen Muller, president of Johns...
Genes & Jingo
Popular journalists have begun writing off the sociobiology revolution. “Can Sociobiology Be Saved? and quote the learned opinions of Stephen J. Gould and Ashley Montagu (would they lie?). They indulge in vaguely worded smears: Konrad Lorenz was a nazi, E. O. Wilson is a Southerner, and sociobiology is a code word for racism among members of the British National Front,...
De Gaulle: Man With a Chest
“The head rules the belly through the chest,” C. S. Lewis writes. Reason cannot rule appetites directly; it needs what the Greeks called thymos, the soul’s “spirited element,” to rule the appetites so that reason can go free. Spiritedness cares for oneself and for those like oneself. Refined, it animates patriotism, courage, honor; at its best it animates magnanimity, “greatness...
Bulgarian Death Squad
Georgi Markov: The Truth That Killed; Ticknor & Fields; New York. Claire Sterling: The Time of the Assassins: Anatomy of an Investigation; Holt, Reinhart & Winston; New York. In 1962 a one-time engineer, Georgi Markov, rose meteroically to the upper reaches of the Bulgarian literary elite upon the publication of a novel entitled Men, which brought him the privilege of...
Commendables
Holy Water for the Rich Bernard Murchland: The Dream of Christian Socialis,; American Enterprise Institute; Washington, D.C. Christianity and socialism exert tremendous influence in our world. Not surprisingly, some people have sought to harness these powerful forces together in one unified engine of change. Today, we hear talk of a “Christian social conscience” and “liberation theology.” Bernard Murchland’s examination of the European...
Trivial Spirits
Malcolm Bradbury: Rates of Exchange; Alfred A. Knopf; New York Vassily Aksyonov: The Island of Crimea; Translated by Michael Henry Heim; Random House; New York. Signs of massive political fatuity abound. In the face of more than a decade of relentless Soviet arms acquisition, righteous notables in the West chant for a (virtually unilateral) freeze on our nuclear weapons with...
Essay: The Literature of Order
Nature imitates art: so Oscar Wilde instructs us. Whether or not natural sunsets imitate Turner’s painted sunsets, surely human nature is developed by human arts. “Art is man’s nature,” in Burke’s phrase: modeling ourselves upon the noble creations of the great writer and the great painter, we become fully human by emulation of the artist’s vision. Or such is the...
Webs of Culture
Clifford Geertz: Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology; Basic Books; New York Paul Elmer More once noted the presence of demons in human society: “The Malec of violence, the Beelzebub of treachery, the Belial of lying flatteries, the Mammon of gold, the Mephistopheles of skepticism, and others of the Stygian Council escaped through the open gates of hell.” Important...
Screen
Saccharin Sobs Places in the Heart; Written and Directed by Robert Benton; Tri-Star Pictures. by Stephen Macauley Robert Benton is the man behind Still of the Night and Kramer vs. Kramer. Places in the Heart, his latest film, is set in a small Texas town during the Depression. The subject—like Kramer vs. Kramer—is separation, but this time it is a wife...
Censorship: When to Say No
Every April since 1981 the American Society of journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. They routinely trot out copies of children’s books like Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson on tolerating “error of opinion,” and some professional...
Censorship: When to Say No
Every April since 1981 the American Society of journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. They routinely trot out copies of children’s books like Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson on tolerating “error of opinion,” and some professional...
Weapons of Despair
Kosta Tsipsis: Arsenal: Understanding Weapons in the Nuclear Age; Simon & Schuster; New York. Freeman Dyson: Weapons and Hope; Harper & Row; New York The peace movement has become a permanent fixture of democratic politics. The movement is most visible when its members are marching in the streets, but it is most effective when there is nothing to march against....
The American Proscenium
French Proscenium William Styron was recently honored by the French government, which made him a Commander of Arts and Letters. In accepting the award, Styron remarked, “Vive la France, Vive l’Amerique and all good things.” Styron may not have a very strong grasp of French, but he loves the country: “I feel particularly good here, and they seem to like...
Journalism
A Plague on Both Your Houses Women have always been our censors. Mrs. Grundy was a household word for inflexible propriety a good 30 years before Dr. Bowdler produced his expurgated version of Shakespeare. Times and manners change, and the American Mrs. Grundys took up, in succession, Abolition, Women’s Suffrage, and Temper ance,butitremainedtruethat: Many are afraid of God ...
Race and Freedom
Thomas Sowell: The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective; William Morrow; New York If valley Girls could read, Thomas Sowell’s book would gag them with the facts. The author, a Chicago-educated economist now at the Hoover Institution, presents his readers with a carefully researched book that is replete with facts about economics, politics, and race. He then goes...
Polemics & Exchanges
Ideologues in Search of a Faith by Louis Dupré I was distressed to read about myself in Lee Congdon’s review of my book Marx’s Social Critique of Culture: “He is typical too in his substitution of secular utopianism for Christian hope” (CC, October 1984, p. 7). My work intends to show the ultimate failure of Marx’s theory of culture and to be a...
In Focus
A Tale of Modern Times William Dear: The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III; Houghton Mufflin; Boston. Dallas Egbert was a genius. At the age of 13 he entered Michigan State University to study computer science. MSU assured the Egberts that the university would take special care of the brilliant but remarkably immature student. Two years later...
The Ingersoll Prizes
“In the long reach of history, it is the cultural institutions which mark the city of enlightenment, not its generals nor its statesmen nor its entrepreneurs.” So declared Dr. John A. Howard, president of The Ingersoll Foundation and of The Rockford Institute, as he welcomed leading scholars, critics, business executives, and patrons of the arts to the second annual Ingersoll...
Waste of Money
Lucrative Lying John Barth: The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction; G.P. Putnam’s Sons; New York “For the writer intent on truth,” Solzhenitsyn observes, “life never was, never is (and never will be!) easy: his like have suffered every imaginable harassment—defamation, duels, a shattered family life, financial ruin or lifelong unrelieved poverty, the madhouse, jail.” Things are quite different for...
Old Answers to Old Questions
After a decade or two of introspective breast-beating, educators are turning from an examination of what is wrong with public schooling to what is right with private schooling. This latest entry to the field examines religious education in the United States. Nearly 5.1 million students attend some sort of private school (K-12), eschewing for whatever reason the “free” government education...
Comment: Subversion at the NEH?
In 1983, the Berlin Senat awarded my German partner and myself a “low-budget” grant to produce a short documentary film about the Great Jewish Cemetery of Berlin (that was founded in 1880 and has over I 10,000 graves). Entitled Bin Verlorenes Berlin,this film suggests that the cemetery itself is the principal surviving relic of the “lost Berlin,” for in its...
The Critical Temper
Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic by David Bromwich; Oxford University Press, New York. T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style by Ronald Bush; Oxford University Press, New York. I stumbled on Hazlitt while I was still in college and have some old books of his that cost me 50 cents each-one that I won’t part with is the...
Filming for Dollars
Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon by Leonard Mosley; Little Brown, Boston. Movies have not always been taken seriously as art. When Rudolph Arnheim 50 years ago compared film with painting, music, and literature, he was being deliberately controversial. It was a long road from the nickelodeon to artistic respectability. Today film no longer needs to be...
Letter From Budapest
Observation of intellectual life in Hungary today provides a fascinating picture of a nation living in two worlds and, in certain ways, profiting by both. “East” and “West” become suddenly realities, cultural as well as political. Soviet occupation has compelled the intellectuals to study Marxist writings, in fields where their Western colleagues, even the leftist ones, are completely uninformed. The...
Nest of Vipers
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir; Pantheon, New York. It may hurt, but it is useful to know that in matters of foreign translations available at our publishers and bookstores, we live in a well-guarded ghetto. There are protective turrets in the ghetto’s wall, called Sartre, Beauvoir, Gunter Grass, Hein rich B6ll, Luigi Barzini, and a few...
Unclassical Tragedy
Wired: The Short Times & Fast Life of John Belushi by Bob Woodward; Simon and Schuster; New York. Bob Woodward is an aggressive journalist who has helped reveal the secrets of Supreme Court Justices and a president. Like his previous efforts, Wired is a best-seller full of gossip and intrigue. Excerpts have appeared in the Washington Post, New York Post, and Playboy. John Belushi found fame...
Who Cares?
The anonymous reviewers at Chronicles of Culture don’t seem to like any thing except right-wing polemics. The problem is the usual plague of the selfrighteous: they have no sense of humor. For them, Roy Blount Jr. is “a humorist of sorts.” What’s the worst thing that can be brought up against him? He wears makeup in the cover photo. There...
Caveat Emptor
In Art, as in most areas of life, California is ahead of the rest of us. A new set of California laws, collectively known as “An Artist’s Bill of Rights,” prohibit the buyer of a work of art from making any alterations in that work without consent of the artist. According to a recent issue of State of the Arts;...
Commedia dell’Arte
George Balanchine died a year ago April. Last July the Ballet Master of the New York City Ballet, John Taras, was finally persuaded by Mikhail Baryshnikov to join the American Ballet Theater. In a recent interview with Dancemagazine, Taras observed that with Balanchine gone “things will not be the same.” How right he was. The New York City Ballet waited...
Success by Association
Gertrude Stein may be the only official member of “The Lost Generation” who has not been disemboweled by literary analysts. Stein’s circle-biographer James R. Mellow called it a “Charmed Circle” in the title of his 1974 book was not restricted to Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and other literati. Gertie, as she was known to some of her pals, also supped with...
Useless Idiots
The History and Impact of Marxist-Leninist Organizational Theory: “Useful Idiots,” “Innocents’ Clubs,” and “Transmission Belts” by John P. Roche; Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge, MA. The joke is as old as Marxism in power: Lenin (or Stalin or Khrushchev or Chernenko) shows his beautiful Crimean villa, his fleet of limousines, his army of servants, and his plush office to...
Foreign Fiascoes
Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World by Jonathan Kwitny; Congdon & Weed, New York. During the formative years of the American republic, Alexander Hamilton proposed that a national debt would be beneficial since it would tie the wealthy, the lenders, to the fledgling government, the debtor. Hamilton doubtless would regard a trillion-dollar national debt as too much of...
Putting Down Uncle Pat
The Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism in the U.S. by Michael Schwartz; Our Sunday Visitor Press, Huntington, IN. Catholicism is so pervasive in America that it is taken for granted as somehow normal. Schwartz traces hostility to Catholicism from its Reformation roots in England, where it was identified with “foreigners” and political conspiracy. Transplanted to the New World, Anti-Catholicism played an important...
Required Reading
Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 by Philip Larkin; Farrar Strauss Giroux, New York. Philip Larkin is a rare thing among literary journalists—his own man. When he edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, he filled it with his own eccentric choices, many of them rhymed and often by uncelebrated poets. His own verse, as recent as it is, owes...
Out of the Closet, Into the Street
For years the editors of Christianity and Crisis have done their best to make friends with the international left, even to the point of adjusting or ignoring inconvenient doctrines. Despite these efforts, The Nation recently took aim at all (not just conservative) religionists and fired a broadside entitled “Political Opium.” C&C’s soul-searching response: What’s the point? On many issues and...
Scandalizing Uncle Ez
The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths by W. Fuller Torrey, McGraw-Hill; New York. Without doubt, Ezra Pound was a remarkable poet. His best verse is beautifully cadenced, delicately chiseled. Herbert Read described him as “an alchemist who transmuted the debased counters of our language into pure poetic metal.” Deferentially, T. S. Eliot called him il miglior fabbro, the better craftsman....
Neutered Conservatism
Reading the September comment, “The Conservative Humanitarian, “brought to mind the old quip about “the bland leading the bland.” A pastiche of unexceptional platitudes, felicitous quotes, and pious laments, Professor Steensma’s essay depicts a “conservatism” that will offend no one—and help just as many. This is lap-dog conservatism: pet it and it wags its tail. Steensma tells us society must...