After an uninterrupted spell of a winter month or two here in Venice—all footsteps in the evening mist, and quiet conversation about the best way to cook pheasant, and a Neapolitan card game called “seven and a half—what one notices on arriving in London is the way women move. First of all, it’s the speed....
1118 search results for: Forgotten%252BHistory
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Old Times There Are Not Forgotten
I’m sure some readers of these letters are tired of hearing what a special place the South is. So I’ll warn you: I’m going to say it again. And I’m going to quote all sorts of other people who say it, too. Come back next month if you can’t take it. The South is a...
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Grow Old Along With Me
“I grow old learning many things,” said Simonides, a poet X well known for his wisdom and for his longevity: He lived to be almost 90. Although, as my old teacher Douglas Young pointed out, Simonides’ statement might be interpreted to mean “too much education makes one prematurely old,” the point is clear enough and...
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Living With Culture
One of the best things in life for a writer who sets out to be an artist is to be appreciated by people whose opinions are generally respected and valued. That is the happy condition in which I find myself this evening, and I thank the directors of the Ingersoll Foundation and the Rockford Institute....
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Love Thy Neighbor
Ben Lummis was not in a mood to write this morning. He wanted to be outdoors, and, because he was an outdoor writer, being outdoors was as legitimate a part of his job as writing about having been outdoors was after he’d been there. His work had two stages, outdoor and indoor, and in the...
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Love it or Leave It?
As ululating headline after ululating headline blares forth Wall Street’s apocalypse; as Obamamaniacs promise race riots to break whitey’s collective spirit once and for all; as concepts like Peak Oil move from the fringes to the mainstream of media discourse; as America is forced to apprehend, in Fay Weldon’s droll aphorism, that “the fin has...
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Kreisleriana
Walking out of Maxim Vengerov’s recent recital at Avery Fisher Hall, I thought of the intermission more as a remission. At a bar in Penn Station a few minutes later, where I heard some Junior Wells on the sound system, the playing (if not the music) was better than anything that the violinist had given....
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Speaker Johnson Gets Swamped Over Ukraine
The return of GOP’s minority-party mindset is very likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy come November.
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How Aussies Lost Their Pride of Erin
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze” Some recent Australian cultural trends—massive Islamic immigration, for instance—are ...
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Bill Clinton and the Ground Zero Mosque: A Perfect Fit
Former President Bill Clinton declared his strong support for the Ground Zero mosque in an interview broadcast on September 12. He also suggested a clever new spin to the promoters of the project. Much or even most of the controversy, he said, “could have been avoided, and perhaps still can be, if the people who want...
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Energized for Liberty
The Senate debate over extending three key sections of the egregiously misnamed USA PATRIOT Act is over, and the winner is . . . Sen. Rand Paul. The losers are clearly Sens. Mitch McConnell and John McCain, both of whom tried desperately to win an extension of what Paul accurately described as “that most unpatriotic...
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Alice of Malice: The Other Side of Rooseveltism
The true nature of the New Deal was revealed in one of those brilliant ironies that flash lightning-like in a midnight storm. It happened September 13, 1933, the Nativity of a new secular holiday: NRA Day. An interminable parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue celebrated the National Recovery Administration, which was to set prices, fix...
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The Lessons of Grenada
“To conquer tumult, nature’s sodin force, War . . . was first devis’d.” —Sir William D’Avenant Grenada’s Communist interlude has become the subject of an intense postmortem by scholars of varying ideological hues. Historically, the small island is destined to be a symbol of the Reagan years. However much the US intervention of October 25,...
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War Party Targets Putin and Assad
Having established a base on the Syrian coast, Vladimir Putin last week began air strikes on ISIS and other rebel forces seeking to overthrow Bashar Assad. A longtime ally of Syria, Russia wants to preserve its toehold on the Mediterranean, help Assad repel the threat, and keep the Islamic terrorists out of Damascus. Russia is...
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The War of Nihilisms
The first English translation of Ernst Jünger’s journals from the Second World War is a cause for celebration. The journals were like treasures stashed away in an old castle, behind a door that could be unlocked only if one learned to read German. It’s open now, and what’s inside are literary gems on every page....
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One Law for the Left…
For many weeks the press in Britain have been obsessed with the Jimmy Savile sex scandal, and it has many months to run. Savile, who died in 2011, aged 84, was a superstar entertainer for the BBC, and his programs attracted millions of viewers. The BBC needed Savile and his huge audiences to justify the...
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Family Feud: The Biden Crime Family Edition
Now that Biden is out of the 2024 presidential race, is Congress just going to pretend this is a game show and ignore the impeachment investigation they voted to advance?
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The Plight of the Homeless
In one of Douglas Adams’ very silly books, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the egocentric two-headed president of the universe, is condemned to undergo the ordeal of the Total Perspective Vortex. It is an excruciating form of torture that exposes the criminal to a sense of the infinite size of the universe and his own small place in...
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On Dr. Samuel T. Francis
I first met Samuel Francis more than 30 years ago, when he was a graduate student in Chapel Hill and a stalwart member of the Carolina Conservative Society—subsequently, the “Orange County Anti-Jacobin League” when it lost its university recognition on a point of principle. I was a brand-new faculty member, a refugee from Columbia University,...
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The Bowe Bergdahl Gaffe
Back in 1988 Michael Kinsley (in the Times of London) famously defined the gaffe as the occasion when “a politician tells the truth.” Kinsley himself immediately watered down his elegant definition by adding “some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say,” as if the code of the politician did not require him to be uniformly...
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Mad Scots and Indians
It would be easy to view the recent spate of movies and documentaries that side with Amerindians against the white man as no more than a long-delayed surge of racial revenge, and of course that emotion is openly expressed in all of them. I refer to the cycle, begun by Dances with Wolves, that includes...
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Cultural Notes, in Two Keys
The liberal print media, like all things liberal, are never more themselves than when searching out, discovering, and deploring violence in America—gun violence, police violence, violence against women, violence against children, violence against racial and ethnic minorities, violence against immigrants, violence against Muslims, violence against homosexuals and “transgender people,” violence against foreign countries and cultures,...
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Mommy’s Little Monster
Monsters are an ancient phenomenon in human history: There have always been individuals whose characters are marked by brutal, sadistic cruelty, who lack any redeeming instincts of compassion or mercy. Call them what we will—fiends or psychopaths, ghouls or serial killers—this type is by no means new to the later 20th century, however much the...
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For God, Country, and Kate Smith
To that select few who have frequented its precincts, it is simply “The Major’s.” In reality it’s the “Globe and Laurel,” along Virginia’s Route One near the main gate to the U.S. Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia. Its proprietor is a sandy haired, crewcut, toothbrush-mustached, immaculately turned out, retired Major of the U.S. Marine Corps:...
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The Empire State of Mind
Nigel Biggar's sophisticated history of British colonialism does not ignore the many benefits reaped by the recipients. His work is relevant to all Western nations, now threatened by faux radicals.
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Carrier, Congress, and Cronies
“Crony capitalism” is the new buzzphrase, now that Donald Trump is cutting deals to keep jobs in the United States. When previous presidents cut deals to allow companies to build new factories in Mexico and overseas while shutting down factories here, no one called it crony capitalism, even though it was; we called those deals...
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The Texas Wild Card
One evening last winter my buddy Eugene and I were shooting the breeze while we sort of half-watched the new, citified Hee Haw (it’s not the sort of show you want to watch alone, and my wife, a nose-breather, won’t watch it with me). Eugene had just finished telling the one about the difference between...
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Jan. 6, 2021: A Day That Will Live in Hymnody
The resistance to tyranny is something to sing about.
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History as Paranoia
There are many conservative, intelligent people who will happily tell you that there is no such thing as the absolute truth of history, only different, mutually complementary versions. History, they will say, is a mutable, fluid continuum, whose multiple truths are constantly undergoing revision and revaluation in one another’s reflected light, as well as in...
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America’s Forgotten 400th Anniversary
We seem to hear little this year about the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in November 1620. Perhaps the coronavirus is the cause, or maybe the ugly mess and turmoil of our presidential election has overshadowed its remembrance. Or maybe political correctness has claimed another victim. Whatever the case, the 400th anniversary...
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Return of the Alien
“The whole world, without a native home Is nothing but a prison of larger room.” —Abraham Cowley His father used to say that the country was good; it was only the people that made it intolerable. Now his father’s son was headed up to that north country, where he had not...
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Reviving the Merchant Marine
In the years following World War II, the merchant marine of the United States went from being the greatest in the world to its present virtual nonexistence. From 1935 through World War II, the United States built some 6,500 merchant ships. When the guns ceased firing, the United States owned the largest merchant fleet in...
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The Geology of Time
Atop the final ridge rising to the south rim, Tom Hart stopped the truck and sat behind the wheel, gazing over into the meandering trench stretching from west to east and across it to the line of blue mountains over 40 miles away. It had been his first sight of the canyon when his family...
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In Darkest London, Part 2
This is the second part of a two-part article written by a white male Catholic convert, 48 years old, who has no specialist theological training whatsoever, is of strictly average intelligence, and represents no interest group or political movement. It derives solely from a recent visit to London, in which nothing spectacularly horrible occurred, and...
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Professing
Emeritus professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, Robert B. Heilman has been publishing for over 60 years and has done distinguished work on drama and fiction. A good book of literary terms, for instance, refers to his Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (1968) under the word “melodrama.” When you become...
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Biden Pins His Hopes on Abortion
Democrats are desperate to make the election a referendum on Dobbs. Trump is right to refuse to resist that.
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Atomic Anniversary
Sixty-five years ago, on August 6, the United States dropped the first offensive nuclear weapon in history. This bomb, code-named “Little Boy,” killed around 140,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan. The U.S. military dropped the second and last nuclear weapon ever used in war, “Fat Man,” three days later ...
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Come, Ye Thankful People
A “progressive” rap on “social conservatives”: All they crave is power to tell you whom to sleep with, and how, and what god (if any) to worship. This contrasts, naturally, with broad-minded types of the progressive persuasion, who don’t care what you do, morally speaking, so long as you don’t say or do anything insensitive...
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Bloodshed in Egypt
The murder of 21 Christians in a New Year’s Day bomb attack in Alexandria will accelerate the ongoing exodus of the Coptic community from Egypt. Its members know that they are second-class citizens. After some three-dozen attacks over the past three decades, resulting in three hundred Christian deaths, they know that the government is both unable and unwilling...
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Contain the Caliphate
“Quarantine the aggressors!” That line out of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous speech signaling the beginning of his open road to war with the Axis powers was much criticized by anti-interventionists, who correctly saw that the President was trying to undermine the great principle of neutrality which had, thus far, kept us out of the European war. ...
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Philosophy in an Old Key
In the ancient world no one could talk or read too much about philosophy. Wealthy Athenian nobles, Plato and Xenophon, for instance—even Roman emperors, like Marcus Aurelius—lived for the hours they could devote to philosophical discourse. The pagan’s conversion to philosophy was as important to him as conversion to Christ was for a Christian. When...
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Neonatal Circumcision: Preventive Medicine or Mutilation?
During most of human history, religious explanations and rituals imparted meaning to people’s lives and justified controlling their conduct. Today, medical explanations and rituals often perform those functions. For example, masturbation and homosexuality were first forbidden on religious grounds, then on medical grounds. Being a male infant is, of course, not behavior. Accordingly, routine neonatal...
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The Civil War of the Right
The conservative movement is starting to look a lot like Syria. Baited, taunted, mocked by Fox News, Donald Trump told Roger Ailes what he could do with his Iowa debate, and marched off to host a Thursday night rally for veterans at the same time in Des Moines. Message: I speak for the silent majority,...
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Bridge of Hope
In 1958, when the first barbed-wire barricades were rolled out by the British colonial government across Ledra Street in the capital of Cyprus, it seemed inevitable that the seeds of division would yield a bitter harvest of intercommunal conflicts, regional tensions, and, finally, the partition of the whole island. Where minarets and churches once jostled...
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Books in Brief: April 2023
Short reviews of Interventions 2020, by Michel Houellebecq, and The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great Power Rivalry Today, by Hal Brands.
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Enthusiastic Democracy
Less than a month after President Bush unbosomed his latest reflections on political philosophy before the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, one of the latest victims of his administration’s crusade to foster the “global democratic revolution” in Iraq was grousing that what the administration planned for his country simply wasn’t democratic enough. The Grand...
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Smearpolitik
After several weeks of fulminating about John Kerry’s war record and the medals he presumably awarded himself, at least some veterans of the Stupid Party eventually got down to the real point about the man who wants to replace ...
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On the Blue-Eyed Coulter
Robert Stacy McCain’s main point in his review of Ann Coulter’s Godless: The Church of Liberalism (“Is Ann Coulter Among the Prophets?” September) seems to be that those of us who are not blonde and blue-eyed should not envy those who are. (“But we all cannot be blue-eyed blondes, and, in the Age of Media,...
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The Wasted Century
The Great War and its inevitable successor have been called Europe’s civil war, and there is some truth in this characterization. Divided by language, religion, and culture, the nations of Europe were nonetheless united in a common civilization that developed out of the ruins of the Christianized Roman Empire. Despite the strains brought on by...
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Hell Is Other People
Robin N—wasn’t sure what was wrong. The suburban Milwaukee mother of three had experienced a pang upon turning 35, but these “pangs” seemed to be intensifying as the months passed. Sometimes, they took the form of paralyzing depression; other times, of anxiety verging on panic. She found herself fearful of going out in public or...