I want to bring your attention to a new film, one that attempts to convey some genuine truths about religious faith and secular governance. My full review won’t appear until Chronicles’ August issue and, by that time, For Greater Glory may have left the theaters. As this is a film that should be seen—as they say—on the big...
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Johnny Cash, R.I.P.
John R. Cash went to his reward on September 12. His beloved wife, June, preceded the “Man in Black” in death on May 15. His friends report that Johnny Cash was at peace and ready to meet his Maker. Cash himself had calmly stated, “I don’t have long to live, now,” during his last TV...
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Science Fiction, R.I.P.
To register the obituary long after the fact: science fiction is dead. Aficionados of the genre who acquired their taste for it in the 1950’s and 60’s probably already know this. What they might not know is that the death of science fiction has significance for the state of American culture in 1997. With the...
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Glimpses Delightful and Rare
One of the root problems facing our beleaguered world is that many of our contemporaries are belaboring the past as a burden, believing that the legacy and traditions of Western Civilization are a millstone around modernity’s neck. Cast off the shackles of the past, with its outmoded morality and outdated way of doing things, and...
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Going Through the Motions
I did not expect to like the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, which is why I had never bothered to go up to Montmartre. The basilica was commissioned by Catholics who had survived the Paris Commune of 1870-71, when churches were destroyed and the faithful were persecuted. Even as the revolution was sputtering out, the communists...
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Who Wants to Be House Speaker?
Weakening House committees had the paradoxical effect of concentrating power in leadership and making the speaker more important in setting the majority’s policy direction—which only turned the speaker into the focus of every member’s discontent and created stronger opposition to him within the party.
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Too Greedy to Hate
Back in the spring there was a lot of hoo-rah in northern Virginia about a plan to build a shopping mall on part of the battlefield at Manassas (“Bull Run” to Yankees). At first, some of us down here suspected a federal plot to obliterate the reminders of two humiliating defeats, but it turned out...
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The New Yorker Under Glass
The first issue of The New Yorker (February 21, 1925) showed on its cover a dandy in top hat, high collar, and morning suit gazing through his monocle at a butterfly. The drawing is reproduced yearly, and butterflies became a cover motif. Whatever tastes, affectations, or snobbery the artist, Rea Irvin, wanted to suggest, it...
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‘Hood Justice’ in Ohio
Three black men involved in the brutal death of a white teen in Ohio walked away with slaps on the wrist, calling into question whether equal justice under the law still exists for whites in America.
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The Hobbyist
The joyous return to Rancho Juárez was dampened, but in no way spoiled, by a certified letter awaiting Mr. and Mrs. Héctor Villa on their arrival. Mailed from the Belen Municipal Court, it threatened their daughter with juvenile detention if she did not return within ten days’ time to complete her court-ordered work with Darfur...
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Our Phildickian World
Sometime during the last decade, the Philip K. Dick cult came out from underground. Those of us who spent the 1980’s trying to explain our affection for this pulp writer no one else had heard of, this author of surreal science fictions and bleak realistic novels, have watched both pop culture and the academy discover...
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For Love of the Muse
“All that matters now is poetry In which the feeling is the thought.” —from “Paysages Legendaires” When writing about the poet Peter Russell, it is hard to know where to begin. First, there is the matter of his prolificness, and the sheer vastness of his oeuvre: Russell, who describes poetry as being “dangerously near the...
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The Wind Listeth
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Speaking from experience, rather than poetic frenzy, I say both. The spring winds blowing white at home in Wyoming blow red down here in New Mexico, a howling gale that seems to be returning to the Dustbowl the errant Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas...
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Mildred Indemnity Always Twice Pierces the Double Postman
The sheer inanity of so much fiction today sends us necessarily to the past, and not always to Balzac and Trollope. If we are looking for something readable and American and modern, then this gathering is just the thing. Indeed, for sheer readability (if not for the finest quality), James M. Cain is hard to...
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Ron Paul’s Last Hurrah
At this point it is clear that Rep. Ron Paul is not going to be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Yet it seems likely that he will outlast all his rivals but for Romney, and that he will have a substantial bloc of delegates at the convention. Paul ...
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Notes From the American Asylum
Many people seem to be wondering what will become of the human soul in another world. I am wondering what has become of the human mind in this world. G.K. Chesterton wrote those words almost a century ago in his essay, “The Rout of Reason.” I find myself wondering the same thing on this August...
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A Republic of Speculators
The long-suffering and largely ignored paleoconservatives might be forgiven for taking some satisfaction in the recent bursting of so many bubbles of avarice and pride, the sudden exposure of so many highly leveraged speculations in stupidity. Let us recount some of the failed millennial assertions by the ruling party: that history has come to an...
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The Way We Are, No. 9
Have we no shame? (No.) —Fred Reed Stimulus: $250 each for Social Security recipients; $250,000,000(?) each for bankers and stock speculators. Sounds like business as usual. With affirmative action and bailouts, the U.S. government has almost succeeded in severing the link between performance and reward. Honest Abe. Fair and Balanced. Compassionate Conservatism. Notice a pattern...
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Victims of Blunt Force Trauma
Even before the end of the trial of Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman for the crime of white racism, the percentage of black Americans who believed that Officer Fuhrman’s most celebrated victim was innocent had risen from 60 percent before the trial to a whopping 78 percent by the time the prosecution rested. It...
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My Conversation With Alex Jones
I always had the general impression that radio shock-jock Alex Jones was a huckster—basically an entertainer, as opposed to a serious person. I’d never bothered to listen to his broadcasts, and all I knew about him was secondhand. My recent encounter with Jones gave me the chance to find out the truth for myself. The...
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The Great Portcullis
In the third week of August someone pushes the button and brings summer to an end in the Mountain West, though beautiful weather and Indian summer lie ahead. Typically the change comes with the discharge of a powerful thunder cell, seemingly no different from any other electrical storm but collapsing into a gray leaden overcast...
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You Get What You Need
So what do I know anyway? I didn’t want him to begin with. I didn’t want him until it became painfully, obviously clear that he alone stood between us and the cultural and economic pillage contemplated by Hillary Clinton. And so, with never a backward look, my wife and I colored in the straight-Republican oval...
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Lech Walesa’s Winsome Call for Globalization
For the last 20 years of the world’s bloodiest century, Lech Walesa, along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, was a man on a pedestal in my pantheon of contemporary heroes, one of those who had helped bring about an end to communism in Eastern Europe and the demise of the Soviet Union. ...
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Debate-o-mania
The wild rhetoric of Harris and Trump in their epic debate-o-mania should be compared with a general ledger of political actions. Election '24 needs an accountant!
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Curiosity as a Social Force
“Curious Barbara’s got her nose in a sling,” goes the Russian admonition against prurience, more puzzling, if anything, than the equivalent English adage concerning the killing, in similarly umbrageous circumstances, of the cat. Why should Barbara meet with such a fate? Just how did it happen that curiosity brought about the death of Fluffy? As...
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Maugham the Master
W. Somerset Maugham was envied for his wealth, ability to travel in style everywhere in the world, and the fact that everything he wrote sold like hotcakes.
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Is Algeria Next?
On January 16 Islamic militants staged an audacious attack on a major natural gas complex in southeastern Algeria, 800 miles southeast from the capital. A jihadist group calling itself the Masked Brigade—led by Moktar Belmoktar, the fierce one-eyed veteran of the Afghan war and a senior commander of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—claimed responsibility...
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The Craft of Flesh and Blood
The landscape of American fiction is a bleak and dreary place these days. It wends through the somber back lots and blue highways of rural America, tends toward the grimy streets of crumbling cities, populated by somewhat dim and desperate characters whose main goal seems to be making it to another day. Call it realism,...
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Secularism and the Mosque Flap
Let's say the mosque (you know what mosque) gets built, as it certainly might, public opinion notwithstanding. What's the next theological concession America's Christian churches get to make in the name of brotherhood, sisterhood, pluralism, world peace and amity, the reconstruction of America's image, etc., etc.? First it's one thing, ...
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The Future of Russia and the West: A Conversation with Elena Chudinova, Part III
[Final part of the interview between Srdja Trifkovic and Elena Chudinova that was started in Part I and Part II.] ST: Finally, this is something I have asked others and never got a satisfactory answer. Why is the Russian intelligentsia so fascinated with the West and why does it still have this inferiority complex vis-a-vis...
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The Cold War Never Ended
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
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Redefined Poverty
The National Academy of Sciences, in a 500-page tome, has redefined poverty. Since 1963, the definition of poverty has been based on a family with two children and the family’s cash income before taxes and what they spent on food. In 1963, a family earning below $3,100 was “poor.” Now the figure is $14,228. Because...
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Biggies
Bram Stoker’s Dracula Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Fuchs, and Charles Mulvehill Written by James V. Hart Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Distributed by Columbia Pictures A Few Good Men Produced by David Brown, Rob Reiner, and Andrew Scheinman Written by Aaron Sorkin Directed by Rob Reiner Distributed by Columbia Pictures There are advantages...
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Aere Perennius
“Who?” This was said in a tone of voice that could only be described as doubtful. I was on the phone with an Italian friend in London, explaining that I could not call him back later that evening because I was off to a concert. “It’s Gergiev, Valery Gergiev. Don’t you know? He’s the most...
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Falling Apart
North-central Idaho is rugged canyon, mountain, and ranch country. Its dominant culture is that of the British and American borderlands. Its people are descendants of 19th-century pioneers and homesteaders (some of them Missouri Confederates who went west after the war). They are fiercely individualistic, but they also take care of one another. They know how to...
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Remembering the Southern Agrarians
In 1920 a group of writers gathered at the home of playwright Sidney Hirsch in Nashville for bi-weekly sessions of reading and dissecting each other’s prose and poetry. It was the beginning of an outpouring of creativity from a group that would try to defend and restore the traditional Southern way of life against the...
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Will Georgia Halt the Radicals’ Revolution?
“In victory, magnanimity… in defeat, defiance.” That counsel about human conflict comes from Winston Churchill. And President Donald Trump, given all he has endured for five years from those piously pleading now for a “time of healing,” cannot be faulted for his defiant resolve to unearth any and all high crimes or misdemeanors committed in the...
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Mercy Is Courage
The Hobbit Produced by New Line Cinema, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Wingnut Films Directed by Peter Jackson Written by Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens Distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures For this month’s column, I’ve enlisted my son Liam to write the review, since he knows far more than I do about J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson’s film...
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Does Iran Really Want a Bomb?
America, we have a problem. In the blood-soaked chaotic Middle East, with few exceptions like the Kurds, our friends either can’t or won’t fight. The Free Syrian Army folded. The U.S.-armed Hazm force in Syria has just collapsed after being routed by the al-Nusra Front. The Iraqi army we trained and equipped fled Mosul and...
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Not the Venice of the North
I have always disbelieved those who would argue that the topography of a country, that is to say its purely geophysical characteristics, is dominant in the shaping of the personality of its people. Stalin used to call them vulgarizers of Marxism and shoot them, but we in the West may simply murmur that they exaggerate...
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A Sticker in Kentucky
Called by its sponsor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, “the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities,” the annual Jefferson Lecture has been delivered by such a variety of historians, scholars, novelists, and poets as to frustrate all efforts to descry a party line among them,...
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Does the Pope Believe in Hell?
“Pope Declares No Hell?” So ran the riveting headline on the Drudge Report of Holy Thursday. Drudge quoted this exchange, published in La Repubblica, between Pope Francis and his atheist friend, journalist Eugenio Scalfari. Scalfari: “What about bad souls? Where are they punished?” Bad souls “are not punished,” Pope Francis is quoted, “those who do...
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The Acts of ‘Axe’
Obama’s personal storyteller David Axelrod sold the American public a bill of goods.
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The Missing Opposition
The late and great Sam Francis famously described the Republicans as the “Stupid Party,” pointing out that its leaders were always shooting themselves in the foot or chickening out and defeating their own declared positions. Actually, although in general not terribly bright, Republican leaders are smart enough to take care of their own power and...
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Obamacare: Charity or Marxism, II
This part two of a series. If you have any doubts about the premise accepted here, that Obamacare represents an implementation of socialist principles, please read Part I. I should not that I have borrowed passages from the first chapter of a book in progress, tentatively titled Cities of Man. In Part III, I’ll...
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Left-wing Normies Have Been Radicalized
It’s time for normal people on the left to take stock of the people and ideas they are supporting. The vicious tribalism they support is leading to contempt for and violence against their fellow citizens.
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Elena Chudinova on the Fall of Europe
Russian traditionalist conservative writer and publicist Elena Chudinova recently gave a lengthy interview to Srdja Trifkovic and was the subject of my article in the latest issue of this magazine. Her recent article, “Eurovision’s Blue Beard” describes the current atmosphere in Europe with the author’s characteristic verve and bluntness. Chudinova’s friend, a religious Christian mother...
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The Media Is Returning to Common Sense… or Deeper Propaganda
I noticed a strange occurrence lately, which started when several articles began to appear asking if we should still wear masks outside. My first reaction to this was, “What do you mean ‘still’?! You don’t need masks outside!” But apparently, officials in states other than my own think you do. Slate, it appears, kicked off this questioning of...
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On Favorites
For many years, I have subscribed to and enjoyed your excellent magazine. I always immensely enjoy the writing of Thomas Fleming, Roger McGrath, and George McCartney. Dr. Fleming’s January Perspective, “Two Oinks for Democracy,” was superb. Dr. McGrath’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” (Vital Signs) was likewise superb, as was Dr. McCartney’s review...
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Rockford in the Springtime
I first entered Rockford the way that most people do when they’re coming from the east, taking the exit off I-90 onto East State Street, where the ramp T-bones into the Clock Tower Resort and Conference Center, now closed for good but then, in November 1995, still home to “the world’s most comprehensive collection of...