As I write, it’s already been three weeks since the Academy Awards broadcast on March 7, and I’m still surprised that the judges for Hollywood’s annual ceremony of self-love named The Hurt Locker Best Picture of 2009, awarding it six Oscars in all. The pooh-bahs of mediocrity voted for art rather than commerce, and so...
1122 search results for: Forgotten%252BHistory
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The Everlasting Frontier
Although the American frontier was officially closed 118 years ago, Americans remain in thrall to its mythic spell and the romance of the American West. Europeans have always viewed our cultural obsession with condescension, though they themselves—the Germans and the Italians especially—are hardly immune to its allure. (On my first visit to the Grand Canyon...
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Homesick in America
“Darlin,’” she said, “I’ll get that. Go ahead and take it.” She was a weathered-looking woman with mousy light brown hair drawn back in a bun and the plain, honest look of one of those faces you see in Depression-era photos from the Dust Bowl, faces that don’t smile—they are just themselves, making the best...
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Literary Worth and Popular Taste
As an academic trained in the study and appreciation of literature, I have spent the better part of my life staunchly defending the ramparts of literary endeavor against the slings and arrows of outrageous pop-fiction lovers. I have steadily despaired of those who read Stephen King, Terry C. Johnston, Mary Higgins Clark, Danielle Steel, and...
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The Great American Disintegration
When a former colleague sent me a snippet from The New Yorker of September 22, 2014—a piece called “As Big As the Ritz,” by Adam Gopnik—the attention therein given to two recent books on F. Scott Fitzgerald caught my eye, not only because I had already acquired one of them, but because I was repelled...
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Comment
The recipients of the 1984 Ingersoll Prizes are Anthony Powell and Russell Kirk The T. S. Eliot prize goes to Mr. Powell and the Richard Weaver prize goes to Dr. Kirk. Anthony Powell The serious novel has undergone a radical transformation in the 20th century. The old narrative forms that had given...
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Bolton Must Go
Donald Trump won in November 2016 in part because he had promised to turn a new leaf in America’s global engagements. Three years ago he spoke against his opponent’s imperial delusions, voiced doubt about the utility of NATO, expressed certainty that he’d find a common language with Putin (declaring Crimea none of our business), promised...
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Man and Everyman
The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis’s masterful critique of the relativism that was as rampant in his day as it is in ours, represented the culmination of the author’s quest for the quintessential meaning of man’s being and purpose. Always a diligent searcher after truth, Lewis had climbed a long and arduous path from the...
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Epicene Europa
“Roll up the map of Europe; it will not be wanted these ten years.” —William Pitt (1806) “Nothing,” goes the Johnsonian cliché, “concentrates a man’s mind more wonderfully than the prospect of being hanged.” This very natural reaction may explain why a whole raft of intellectuals, journalists, and even politicians, none of whom was previously...
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Tyranny In a Good Cause
Democracy or Republic? might well be the title of the D debate between liberals and conservatives on the nature of the American political system. (In the view of some liberals, the easiest way to spot a conservative is the habit of referring to America as a republic.) Democracy, in the strict procedural sense of one...
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The Russian Frontier
America, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner had it, is a land defined by its frontiers, once inexorably westward- lending, led by Manifest Destiny. The cultural geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer gave Turner’s “frontier thesis” a twist that denizens of the New West will appreciate: “The westward movement in American history,” he wrote, “gave rise to the...
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Truth and Public Truth
“It is as hard to tell the truth as to hide it.” —Baltasar Gracián While the conservative movement, like the liberal one, has its share of dishonest and fraudulent people, liberalism is itself an inherently dishonest business whose promulgators have been lying to themselves, as well as to everyone else, lo these many generations. As...
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Boys Will Be Boys
When my daughter, Katie, was in the fifth grade, her grammar school conducted a week-long series of tests inspired by the White House to promote physical fitness for schoolchildren. Children who completed the tests with passing marks—the standards for passing were not high—received a certificate from the President. The kids ran, jumped, and stretched, and...
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Lemons
When he was younger, my son would pipe up from time to time with what he called “Scott’s rules to live by,” his distinctly personal little life guides. My all-time favorite, arrived at when he was seven, was “Never get your hair cut by a man named Buster.” But the tidbit I would ponder most...
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The Heartland Is Real
America is an Idea and the First Universal Nation. So say the bedizened oracles and prancing shamans of the American Empire—empire, for what is universal cannot be a nation. But people don’t live on an idea. They live on land—lush or dry, rocky or fertile, according to their fates. If they are lucky, it is...
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THE LEADERS WE DESERVE II: February 2007
PERSPECTIVE Pigs Is Pigsby Thomas Fleming Pretending with principles. VIEWS It’s the War, Stupid!by Leon Hadar Election 2006 and beyond. Committing Political Suicideby Doug Bandow The 109th Congress. Lost in Iraqby The Hon. John J. Duncan, Jr. The election, Republicans, and conservatives. The End of the Rove Era in Republican Politicsby Tom Pauken Time to...
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Compassion, Inc.
April 19, 1995, is a date etched in the minds of all who live in Oklahoma City, because it was on that day at 9:02 A.M. that the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed. Just as most Americans alive at the time of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination remember where they were when they...
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Reason Can’t Prevail Against an Irrational Opposition
“Mandalorian” star Gina Carano made headlines this week when she was fired from Disney. Her crime? Authoring a social media post comparing the censorship of conservatives to Nazi persecution. Disney’s decision set off a salvo of justified attacks on the company. But while the self-righteous anger is gratifying to fans both of Carano’s acting and...
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A Valentine’s Day Reflection
A year or so ago, I discovered the work of Czech author Karel Capek who died on the eve of World War II. He was very popular in Eastern Europe and is barely known in the West. Most famous for his science fiction masterpiece War with the Newts (the salamanders, not the repulsive Republican politicians),...
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Recreating the Epic
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” —Genesis 2.7 The 19th century had an unfortunate passion for novels in verse. I have tried to read some of the more celebrated, notably Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora...
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Greater Than the French Revolution
On July 15, 1870, the French Empire mobilized its armed forces, and the following day, the North German Confederation—led by Prussia—followed suit. Once the Franco-Prussian War was declared, actual combat began with startling rapidity. The Prussians won a decisive victory at Sedan at the start of September, capturing French Emperor Napoleon III. Even so, the...
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Opposing the Disneyfiers
Paul Fussell’s enemies are “habitual euphemizers, professional dissimulators,” and the “Disneyfiers of life.” He is in favor of cojones, which is why he ends up in one of his essays liking the Indy 500 in spite of himself, comparing it favorably to the violence of the Falklands War, which is going on while he watches...
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My Big Brother
Not long ago, while reading A.J.P. Taylor’s impressively turgid English History: 1914-1945, I found, suspended in the tepid depths of all the fussily annotated tables and statistics, a sentence that all but knocked me out of my chair. It read, “Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could cheerfully grow old and hardly notice the...
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Remembering Tender Mercies
In the years just before America’s entry into World War II, thousands of people, shaken and scattered by the Great Depression, made their way to Houston, where the shipyards were booming. My people wound up there, too. The place they lived was called West End, rows of little white houses set up on cinder blocks,...
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The Ruling Class
One of the ironies of American political discussion in the last generation or so— indeed, of the last century—has been that, for all our boasting and braggadocio about being a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, it is almost impossible to find any significant American social thinker who really believes...
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Aborted Economy
“Demography is destiny,” sociologists and demographers tell us. No. Morality is destiny. Demography stems from that, as does economics. Americans now are learning that lesson the hard way. Tax rates, debt, deficits, trade policy, monetary policy, government spending, and other factors all affect economic growth and prosperity. But they’re all trumped by demographics—and above that,...
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Beyond All the Shouting
While Cold Mountain, the admittedly well-wrought novel about a Confederate deserter, has achieved bestseller status, a story of a quite different sort has gained a modest but devoted readership and demonstrated anew the gifts of one of America’s finest writers. Nashville 1864 is a mere 129 pages long. Still, it is best not read in...
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Si vis pacem
“All may have if they dare try a glorious life or grave.” I saw those words—George Herbert’s, as it turned out—incised into the stonework of a church near Waterloo Station. There was a little churchyard nearby, it was a warm spring afternoon, and I think I must have read those words over a thousand times. ...
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Well-Regulated Militia
Last June, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, loosed a posse of some 700 well-armed and irate citizens to win back control of the streets and parking lots of Phoenix from the local goons. The sheriff’s pronouncement, “We’re going to get the bad guys,” alarmed the local ACLU, which likened the militia to “a...
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The First and Final Command
Of Gods and Men Produced by Why Not Productions and Armada Films Directed and written by Xavier Beauvois Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Director Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men quietly, one might say austerely, meditates on the faith and courage of nine French Trappists who faced death at the hands of Muslim fanatics...
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Cupid’s Thunderbolt
In the weeks immediately following the encounter with the illegal immigrants in the arroyo, Jesús “Eddie” and Héctor were men possessed by a single idea, though not the same one. Jesús could think only of joining up with the recently formed Critter Company, based in El Paso but with a chapter in Deming, and fighting...
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The Angry Summer
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . . —Psalm 144:1 According to the Washington Post, McAllen, Texas is an “all-American city,” albeit one “that speaks Spanish.” So it’s small wonder that “immigration isn’t a problem for this Texas town—it’s a way of life.” ...
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On the Death of Newspapers
This past week, word came to me that a close friend and book-review editor of a major daily newspaper had been laid off after 16 years of service. The book page, one of the nation’s best, would be reduced by half, and his “replacement” would be a youngster from the city desk, a competent young...
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Come Into the Garden, Maud
A year after the American debut of Jascha Heifetz in 1917, James Huneker wrote an interesting sentence in the New York Times: “Much has been said of Heifetz and his musical gifts compared with great violinists of the time—Ysayë, Kreisler, Elman, Zimbalist, Kubelik, and Maud Powell.” We notice that one of these great violinists is...
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A Real Place
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! —Sir Walter Scott This work reminds me, on an appropriately more modest scale, of John Lukacs’s book on Philadelphians. Both hearken back to a time when Americans were a semicivilized people who lived in...
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Hungary: Steady as She Goes…
Upon his return from a week-long stay in Budapest, Srdja Trifkovic provides an assessment of Hungary’s current political scene in his weekly roundup of world affairs for Serbia’s top-rated Happy TV network. He also looks at the central European country’s role in EU politics, which occasionally may appear disproportionate to its modest size and resources....
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On the Chesterton Review
The Chesterton Review continues on, after celebrating its 30th anniversary last year. Back in 1974, on the centenary of the birth of the great English writer G.K. Chesterton, a small and seemingly insignificant literary journal was launched in England in honor of his memory. At the time, it seemed that the memory was fading. England,...
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The End of Strong Government?
The May 6 general election in England was one of the most eagerly contested in recent history. At stake were 649 parliamentary seats (one vote has been postponed because of the death of a candidate) for which there were almost 4,150 candidates. Also up for grabs were 4,222 local council seats in 164 English local...
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A Soviet Psychosis
As Mikhail Gorbachev moves forward in his role as the new Vozhd of the USSR, he must take pride in a unique achievement. In a few years, he has managed to internationalize a Russian word—glasnost—and by its repeated use at home and abroad has dazzled the world with miracles that have yet to materialize. Whatever...
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Government of the People
The doctrine of states’ rights has returned to the American political scene. Leftist and liberal governors have been dusting off the arguments of John C. Calhoun and echoing the speeches of Strom Thurmond in preparation for their defiance of the national government. The battle is being fought on several grounds. In Massachusetts, the fight is...
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A Historic Presidency
In the first two decades of the century, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. He was an ever-reliable liberal interventionist. This same Antony Blinken could spend the first years of a Biden presidency helping extricate our country from the misbegotten wars he championed....
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Legends of the Four-Lane Road
The interstate highways, John Steinbeck complained in his 1962 memoir Travels with Charley, “are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. When we get these thruways across the country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” When...
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Communication as Manipulation
In her chosen role as doting public grandmother to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, columnist Mary McGrory is ever on the alert for opportunities to whip from her journalistic handbag her favorite images of those two extraordinary kids. In true grandma-like fashion, she is transfixed by their every utterance and sees their failures as simply...
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What We Are Reading: August 2024
Short reviews of I Believed by Douglas Hyde, and Primal Screams by Mary Eberstadt.
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Commendables
Original Thought & Triplicate Forms George Roche: America by the Throat: the Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy; Devin-Adair; Old Grennwich, CT. Edwin J. Feulner, Jr: Conservatives Stalk the House: the Republican Study Committee 1970-1982; Green Hill; Ottawa, IL. Conservatives come in at least two types: those who wish to conserve principles and those who wish to...
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Benjamin Franklin’s American Dream
Today’s preferred way to think about immigration and the nation-state is exemplified in the title of a 1964 pamphlet that the Anti-Defamation League published posthumously under the name of John F. Kennedy: A Nation of Immigrants. The next year, the martyred President’s brother Teddy had his name put on the 1965 immigration act of such...
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The Mythological South
Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law opens with rolling shots of New Orleans townhouses) tenements, the down and out on a crummy side-street. From there we enter into two variations on the theme of domestic disharmony, Jack’s and Zack’s, and on to a story set in a South that never was, by a film maker who,...
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A Representative Man
“A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” —Thomas Carlyle Even in these dreariest of days in academia, when American history has largely become a plaything for canting ideologues, the Old South continues to attract outstanding talent. Fine books and articles continue to appear, as Clyde Wilson’s Carolina Cavalier attests, notwithstanding the...
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The Myth of Learning Disability
In advertising, it’s called weasel type, those tiny bits of typography which explain the nut of the matter (Offer expires on May 31, 1997. Employees of XYZ Corp. are ineligible). So, here goes the weasel type of this discourse. I am not a teacher. Nor am I a mother. Not even a research scientist, a...
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Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost
Andrew Lytle’s “The Hind Tit” is the best essay in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), not only because it focuses on the small, independent farmer, the class the Agrarians most admired, but also because Lytle nails the volume’s primary thesis to the church door, the dilemma his region and nation faced in 1930—the choice between...