The United Methodist Church, having declined from 11 to 8 million members in the United States, spent millions on a television and newspaper ad campaign called “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.” Those millions were probably wasted, however. The ad campaign has been overshadowed by unwanted publicity over increasingly routine battles about homosexuality. Last fall,...
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Between Two Worlds
Reflecting on his upbringing in Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul denies cultural identity to his part of the Caribbean: “Nothing bound us together except this common residence.” Indeed, the area called Caribbean is constantly redefining itself. Its tongues include English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Its population shows large deposits of Chinese and Indians as well as African...
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Treasure Mountain
In the elation and excitement produced by Héctor’s interview with the curandera, he and Jesús “Eddie” could barely resist the impulse to start at once for Ladron Peak. A late-winter storm of unusual force for central New Mexico restored them to their senses, blanketing the peak and the mountains to the southwest and east in...
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John di Martino
In the early days of his career in 1982, jazz pianist John di Martino was a member of the house trio accompanying such internationally famous vocalists as Billy Daniels and Keely Smith at Steve’s Lounge and Elaine’s Lounge, two of the show rooms at Atlantic City’s Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino. He also played electric...
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The Last Day of May
Farewell the plumèd troop, and the big wars, That make ambition virtue!… Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone! (Shakespeare 3.3.349-357) Here I intuit the thoughts of Theresa May, as she prepares to leave office. For her though the office of Prime Minister is not an “occupation,” it is the self. Take, for example, being welcomed on...
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The Lady of the Camellias
I once asked a most discriminating gentleman, who had studied singing, which opera he would call his favorite. He named La traviata. Since then, René Weis has lent support to his opinion at fascinating length in his book, The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis (2015). In demonstrating the worth and intensity of Verdi’s...
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Living With Lenin
An interesting sidelight on our current ruling regime is its changed attitude toward Russia. From the time of the Russian Communist takeover until quite recently, American leftist “intellectuals” sympathized with the Russian regime and gave it every benefit of the doubt. During the Cold War leftists pushed for unilateral Western disarmament, beating down those who...
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A Forgotten Document
A few months after the close of the American Civil War there was a brief but intense and interesting correspondence between Lord Acton, the European historian of liberty, and General R.E. Lee, hero of the defeated Confederacy, on the issues of the war. In the course of this correspondence Acton commented that Appomattox had been...
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Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow
At the 1992 Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton adopted Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinkin’ About Tomorrow)” as his unofficial theme song. Its bouncy, optimistic strains would be reflected in Clinton’s line, four years later, that “We do not need to build a bridge to the past, we need to build a bridge to the future.”...
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Did You Ever . . . ?
The past few years have not been good ones for Southern comedians (some of our politicians aside). First we lost the Reverend Grady Nutt, whose gentle Baptist humor was one of the high spots of the syndicated television program Hee Haw. Southern Baptist preachers drink a lot of iced tea in the line of duty:...
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When Canada Expanded
Canada is critical of talk of U.S. expansion, but its own history involves coercing Newfoundland into union and away from U.S. influence.
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Battles of the Books
I have several times passed through Figline Valdarno without realizing it was the birth place of Marsilio Ficino, the head of the Platonic Academy of Florence. Ficino was a strange bird: part Platonist, humanist, and part Christian, he has sometimes been suspected of paganism or worse. Perhaps he was a pagan, somewhere in his mind,...
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On Liberty and the Grand Idea
For a long time I thought I knew how to evade the discourse of the Grand Idea. It began when I was in the Yugoslav People’s Army. The war was barely over, but victory brought no greater liberty to those who had suffered the Nazi occupation, and the brainwashing in the barracks grew more and...
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The Fixer
This new biography of one of the great “fixers” in American political life, James F. Byrnes, creates the impression of an American Ozymandias, proclaiming by example the ephemerality of human greatness. Byrnes and his political colleagues did mold the world in which we live long after the last of them died; yet the scene of...
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Twelve Westerners?
“The Sahara of the Bozart,” more than anything else Mencken wrote about the South, won him the undying hatred of the former Confederacy and its spokesmen. The essay, which first appeared in 1917 as a newspaper column and was subsequently expanded for inclusion in the next volume of the Prejudices series, was attacked at the...
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The Constitution: Hate Crimes’ Latest Victim
New federal hate-crimes legislation is on the way. Never one to miss an opportunity to expands its powers, the national government has capitalized on a perceived rash of hate crimes in order to increase federal jurisdiction, and the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1999 (HCPA) will probably become law in the near future. When confronted...
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Comment
The contemporary ideological debate on social issues sometimes resembles a squabble between two second-graders as to which has the tougher father. Common sense and principle fall victim to pride and enthusiasm. Conservative and liberal have too often become, in modern usage, handy but meaningless epithets tossed about by single-issue demagogues for their own political convenience,...
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Still Storied
As traditional as a Chinese restaurant, as homegrown as a Subaru, as agrarian as a fax machine, as Celtic as a computer, as handcrafted as cable television, as hospitable as an eight-lane expressway, as Baptist as a drug deal, as Presbyterian as neo-pagan worship, as Episcopalian as a lesbian sermonette, and as pious as an...
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New England Against America
“The fiction of Mr. Simms gave indication, we repeat, of genius, and that of no common order. Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a Southerner…. His book, therefore, depended entirely upon its own intrinsic value and...
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Bomb Iran—July 2008
PERSPECTIVE Bush's Whips, McCain's Scorpions by Thomas Fleming VIEWS John McCain on Foreign Policy by Ted Galen Carpenter Even worse than Bush. Neo-McCainism by Leon Hadar The highest stage of neoconservatism? The Dream Ticket by Srdja Trifkovic The most dangerous man in America, bankrolled by the most evil man in the world. A ...
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Defending the West . . . Against Itself
In his article “A Just and Necessary War,” published in the New York Times on May 25, President William Jefferson Clinton summarized the case for his war against the Serbs. He elaborated on his “vision,” arguing that the bombing of Serbia was the response to “the greatest remaining threat to that vision; instability in the...
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Obama’s Fatal Mistake
Never underestimate the stupidity of our rulers. When Judge Andrew Napolitano of Freedom Watch asked me if I thought President Obama would intervene in Libya, I said, “No, he’s too smart for that.” I attribute my misreading of events to my reading of the President’s general demeanor. Obama projects the aura of a disinterested scientist,...
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The Writer and the Lawyers
If there are two vocations more opposite than, on the one hand, the starving but gifted poet, mystery and horror-story writer, and prolific essayist and, on the other, the obscenely rich, ambulance-chasing attorney, this writer does not know them. Yet these two are conjoined at birth. To understand this, one must know something about the...
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Writing Without Letters
Whatever happened to the old middle-to-highbrow American culture? Once upon a time, there was a fair-sized literate class that kept up on fiction and verse by reading the great organs of literary opinion. These days there is a great gulf between serious literature and general-interest journalism. “Literary” magazines—Kenyon Review, Daedelus, or Sewanee Review, for instance—now...
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Living the Good Life in the South
Havilah Babcock was a teacher who was once one of the best-known educators in South Carolina and a writer who had a national audience. Today, few remember him. This is partly because of the passage of time—Babcock died in 1964. It is more owing to changes in American life and literature. Babcock was a proud...
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Toward One Nation, Indivisible
It is time we looked at the world from a new perspective, one of enlightened nationalism. Cliches about a “new” global economy aside, there has always been an international economy—ever since Columbus stumbled onto the Western Hemisphere while seeking new trade routes to the East, in the hire of a nation-state, Spain. The Dutch East...
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The War’s Destruction of Ukrainian Culture
One of the forgotten casualties of the war in Ukraine, as in all wars, is the loss of high-cultural monuments and works of art.
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Rediscovering the French in Early Florida
Long-forgotten is the early struggle between the Huguenots and the Spaniards for colonization of Floridian territory, where the Timucuan Indians dwelt.