“Much law, but little justice.” —Thomas Fuller With five votes around here you can do anything,” Justice William Brennan told his law clerks, thus summarizing the quintessence of Brennanism. That constitutional law is not something derived from the text, structure, and history of the various provisions of the Constitution but rather a creation of the...
“Who can keep up with anything these days?” —Denis Donoghue, The New Republic, 3/10/86 “If a National Theater is to be in only one city, it should, of course, be in New York, the center of the country’s cultural life and the fount of its theatrical traditions. That’s where the acting and directing talent would...
Without unity among Christians, there can be no Christian state.
This issue of Chronicles commemorates what I suppose is an anniversary, of sorts. It has been nine years since the February 2003 issue questioning the legitimacy of the war in Iraq was published, an anniversary which also roughly corresponds to the planning leading up to and including the prosecution of the war. Aside from the...
Alberto Gonzales’s nomination as attorney general by President George W. Bush makes official what has long been hidden and/or denied: The United States, contrary to her public professions and signed treaties, endorses and uses torture. At one point during Gonzales’s January 6 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy asked about recently...
“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” —The Second Amendment Like a recidivist criminal free to strike at will, the United States Congress slashed the Bill of Rights last year, tearing through the widely ignored Second...
The Lives of Others Produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk and Creado Film Directed and written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Breach Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Billy Ray Screenplay by Adam Mazer and William Rotko Anyone who wants to know what it is like to live in a...
If Hillary Clinton is elected president on Tuesday, and if what Bret Baier is reporting from FBI sources on Fox News is true, America is headed for a constitutional crisis. Indeed, it would seem imperative that FBI Director James Comey, even if it violates protocol and costs him his job, should state publicly whether what...
“How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” —Neville Chamberlain Persons with roots in Central and Eastern Europe know that to speak with minimal competence about that part of the world...
The Balkans war seemed to be coming to an end in mid-December as we went to press. Trying to sort through the lies, misinformation, and distortions for the fragments of truth in the international press requires the patience of an archeologist and the imagination of a poet, but some things seem fairly certain. For several...
Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, by Cal Flyn (Viking; 384 pp., $27.00). In our era of ecological angst, many are desperately seeking strategies to mitigate human damage, but Scottish writer Cal Flyn suggests a holistic new way—one that is simultaneously haunted and hopeful—of seeing these problems. She writes often in sorrow, sometimes in righteous...
Short reviews of From Immigrant to Public Intellectual, by Murray Sabrin, and The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, by Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer.
Anthony Weiner is, in the immortal words of one Oscar-winning actress, so five minutes ago. Almost a decade and a half before the instrument of Weiner’s downfall launched on July 15, 2006, that line from one of the most perceptive films of the 1990’s presciently captured the essence of modern social media. Anyone who follows...
Our mainstream media largely ignored it, the world media did not. Ascending the stairs of Air Force One on Friday, to fly to Georgia, President Joe Biden slipped and stumbled. Getting up, he slipped again and then fell. The scene was jolting and disquieting. Adversaries abroad will use it as a metaphor for the decline...
Today, a century after the close of the “war to end all wars,” the prospect of achieving what the U.N. and other such garrulous bodies call “global peace” seems ever more remote. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, if only we could establish everywhere the right to equality before the law, freedom of...
Last year, President Clinton, who has rarely found a conflict that lie did not want to join, complained to the Veterans of Foreign Wars that Congress was cutting foreign aid, “the very programs designed to keep our soldiers out of war in the first place.” He threatened to veto the foreign-assistance appropriation hills passed by...
“The earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods.” —Numbers 16:32 The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 convinced Voltaire (who didn’t need convincing to begin with) of the nonexistence of God. The Great California Earthquake, when it comes (as it must),...
A hundred years from now historians, if they are still permitted to research and write, will argue about when the United States started down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. Many Southern historians believe it began with the erosion of the U.S. Constitution occasioned by President Lincoln’s disregard of that document and by the Reconstruction Era....
Since the 1960’s, American politics at the national level has primarily consisted of an endless search for a new majority. The Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil-rights movement kicked off the quest by undermining the New Deal coalition that combined white Southerners with white, ethnic, Northern union members, allowing the Republican Party to invade the...
On August 1 The Daily Mail published an op-ed by Melanie Philips (“Hatred, smears and the liberals hell-bent on bullying millions of us into silence”) which warns that the baleful effects of Anders Breivik’s recent attacks in Norway have not been limited to the carnage of the day. The atrocity has produced a reaction on the...
American Sniper has generated more commentary, both scathingly critical and laudatory, than any film in recent memory. The story of “America’s deadliest sniper,” Texas-born and -bred Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (credited with more than 160 “confirmed” kills), himself shot down in 2013 by a disturbed war veteran he was trying to help, has become a...
There is a global movement to remove the residues of Western imperialism from society, one seen in the toppling of monuments dedicated to Western explorers and statesmen. Activists also assert that developing countries must be permitted to chart a new course without cultural interference from the West. Yet this assertion breaks down when it comes...
Y2K has come and gone, and the modern world (for good or ill) is still standing. In the United States, business and government spent heavily on Y2K fixes; in foreign countries, much less. Yet the results were similar: Y2K was a false alarm. Why were so many computer-savvy people mistaken? The reason computers did not...
The question of sovereignty reappeared at the end of the Middle Ages, when many began to ask not only what is the best possible form of government, or what should be the purpose of the authority held by political power, but what is the political bond that unites a people to its government? That is...
In my essay “Triberalism“ in last October’s issue of Chronicles, which detailed the hijacking of the Chicago Tribune in recent years by in-your-face homosexuals and other assorted leftwing counterculture misfits, I noted that there was still at least one Tribune writer who had the courage to thumb his nose at his paper’s new policy equating...
“Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse will not hold.” —William Shenstone In the popular memory the interwar years in Western Europe were a period of instability, inertia, and poverty or, as Auden described the 1930’s, “a low dishonest decade.” One seldom hears about the interesting fact that during those interwar years, in...
Barely a week after, the Tiananmen Square massacre, Ronald Reagan showed up in London to deliver himself of some post-presidential opinions. As the nation’s newest elder statesman, Mr. Reagan received international headlines for his speech, which turned out to be a long variation on his best-known line from Death Valley Days: progress is our most...
There have been strong empires with weak currencies, but not often and not for long. The Soviet Union, Spain after Philip II, the Ottoman Empire after Suleiman, and an impoverished Britain after Versailles all come to mind. That financially fragile states cannot support ambitious political and military ventures is obvious to common sense and confirmed...
Candidates and the people, be in no doubt as to the seriousness of your position.
Ten years ago, on the morning of September 11, I was in my apartment in California getting ready for work when a friend called. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “What’s going on?” “Just turn on the TV.” I turned on the tube in time to see the second airliner crash into the south tower...
As war clouds loom over the political landscape and the propaganda wafts thickly from the major news media, we have to ask: Where does all of this come from? Who is behind the rush to war? Pat Buchanan has utilized a useful phrase to describe the origins of this bloodlust: the War Party. This term...
I said at the beginning that man is a mammalian species. From this one simple fact flow many important consequences for the human race. As the word “mammal” indicates, our females nurse their young, which requires diversification of the roles played by males and females, but even those words males and females tell us...
“The adulterous connection of church and state.” —Thomas Paine Is “separation of Church and State” a bedrock principle of the U.S. Constitution? Should it be? The answers of constitutional historians Daniel L. Dreisbach and Philip Hamburger fly in the face of conventional wisdom, embodied in such cases as Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe...
Bolshevism evolved into religion, some kind of materialistic pagan religion, which worships Lenin and his like as demigods, while considering lies, deceit, violence, the oppression of the poor, the demoralizing of children, humiliation of women, destruction of the family . . . and the reduction of all the nation to extreme poverty as the principles...
Swish . . . creak—chunk. Swish . . . creak—chunk. At the top of the press stroke the lubricated brass shell rises into the top of the press frame where it is engaged by the sizing die, screwed down and secured by the locking nut. On the downstroke it catches momentarily in the die before...
More than a few conservatives and Republicans, by no means necessarily the same people, denounced Donald’s Trump’s imprudent remarks about Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who spent more than five years as a POW in Vietnam. Said Trump, “he’s a war hero ’cause he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK.” This insulted all...
In one of his earliest essays, Walker Percy expounded a theory of “Metaphor as Mistake,” and it is true that many insights, not all of them metaphorical, can arise from misunderstanding or, as happens to me more frequently these days, mishearing what someone has said. A psychiatrist friend, back about 1970, told me of a...
The Descendants Produced by Ad Hominem Enterprises Written and directed by Alexander Payne Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Young Adult Produced and Distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody (Brooke M. Busey) The Descendants and Young Adult are dark satiric comedies that insist on an unpopular thesis: Sexual misbehavior...
Like 9/11, Hurricane Harvey brought us together. In awe at the destruction 50 inches of rain did to East Texas and our fourth-largest city and in admiration as cable television showed countless hours of Texans humanely and heroically rescuing and aiding fellow Texans in the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. On display this week...
After spending several weeks in deep hugger-mugger at the Republican Party platform committee this summer, the leaders of the right wing of the GOP emerged triumphant. Their deeply beloved and totally useless Human Life Amendment was reaffirmed. The obnoxious statement of “tolerance” for the opinions of those who disagree with the amendment was excised. Language...
It was in 1942 that John Crowe Ransom coined the phrase “The New Criticism” by publishing a book under that title, a book about the most respected literary critics of the first half of the century, notably T.S. Eliot, LA. Richards, William Empson, Yvor Winters, and R.P. Blackmur. But actually, he was criticizing the critics...
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,But leech-like to their fainting country cling—Shelley I have finally reconciled myself to the sad truth that I will probably never get to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom. I’ll probably never get to sit next to Ruth Bader Ginsburg at dinner, shake hands with Rush Limbaugh, or tour...
Christopher Sandford of this parish is not only an adorner of these pages but has also garnered considerable status as a cultural historian. His inquiring eyes range widely, playing over everything from cricket to Kurt Cobain, the Great War to The Great Escape, Conan Doyle to Eric Clapton, and countless other late-19th- and 20th-century Anglospheric...
The September 1991 Tailhook scandal has done more damage to the United States Navy than Admiral Sergei Gorshkov and his Soviet fleet had ever hoped to do. Although military law appears to have been violated, the escapade itself was worse than criminal—it was stupid! In this day of radical feminism, the senior officers of the...
Lincoln’s war against Southern independence is just one component of the American Civil War. Like a Matryoshka doll, the Civil War opens up to reveal a set of nested wars, one inside another. There is Lincoln’s war against international law; his war against the Congress; his war against the judiciary; his war against the Bill...
A former Cheney staffer looks back with sadness at a man who refused to admit his errors and who is ending his career as a Republican politician with a spite-motivated endorsement of the opposition.
The Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, which Defense Secretary James Mattis presented on January 19, envisages aggressive measures to counter Russia and China and instructs the military to refocus on Cold War-style competition with them, away from terrorist threats and “rogue nations.” This is in stark contrast to Barack Obama’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, which called...
America’s descent into banana republicanism continues apace, and on two fronts. To begin with, we learn that President Trump’s much-disdained assertion that Trump Tower was being wiretapped during the election campaign turns out to be absolutely true. On September 19, CNN reported that Paul Manafort, who lived in Trump Tower and was Trump’s campaign manager...
America went to war against the Serbs in March, ostensibly because of their refusal to sign the so-called peace agreement put forward by the United States and its allies at Rambouillet, France. Many other reasons were subsequently advanced, but this was the original one. President Clinton told us that the Albanians “chose peace” by signing,...
Only the most delusional limey would deny that, when it comes to popular culture, Britain is downstream from America. In politics, too, we follow your lead. Tony Blair pursued Bill Clinton’s middle way; David Cameron adopted George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism—although Tories won’t readily admit that. A whole generation of British politicians grew up watching...