Fashions do not feed us, they only ensnare us. They do not satisfy us, they only contribute to our ongoing dissatisfaction with the fleetingness of everything. But they always seem more appealing and urgent than what really matters and what will remain after the fashions have fled. English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was once...
Radically recasting America’s formative years would be damaging enough, but The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is applying that same radical intellectual perspective on American history to contemporary social issues and problems. That intellectual perspective has its own history. It developed in earnest during the tumult and chaos of the Black Power radicalism of the...
It was the second night of RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults), and Ted, the amateur catechist in charge of the class, was on a roll. The students were an odd lot of fallen-away Catholics, disgruntled Protestants who wanted to become Catholics, and men and women engaged to Catholics who objected to mixed marriages. ...
The Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE) has been in the forefront in devising the new paradigm of strategic trade and industrial policy. This set of essays by BRIE members articulates the group’s view of how the major national economies grow, innovate, and compete with one another and examines the various alternative world orders...
Phoenix Produced by Schramm Film Koerner & Weber and Bayerische Rundfunk Directed and written by Christian Petzold Distributed by Sundance Selects The Gift Produced by Blue-Tongue Films and Blumhouse Productions Directed and written by Joel Edgerton Distributed by STX Entertainment and Showtime Networks German director Christian Petzold’s new film, Phoenix, begins with a perfectly dark...
As a boy, your author lived in a working-class neighborhood just outside Houston’s city limits. My parents were the children of rural people who had come to Houston looking for work during the Great Depression. They lived in frame houses sitting on cinder blocks in Houston’s West End, a community of people Larry McMurtry called...
As my many devoted readers have already noticed and let me know, though I do love good music, it’s hard to convey the intensity of that devotion. So it occurred to me to write about abject rather than exalted musical experiences. They’re easier to deal with, yet also productive, particularly as the experience of ugly...
Who in modern Western society has not heard of that category of citizens honorably known as intellectuals? They profess to be the thinking part of the nation, the people whose special calling is to ponder public or private matters. Not possessed of a particularly low opinion of themselves, they even lay claim to a spiritual...
Metternich: Strategist and Visionary by Wolfram Siemann; Translated by Daniel Steuer; Belknap Press, Harvard University; 928 pp., $39.95 All states need a strategy, however rudimentary, in order to survive. Great powers need much more: a viable grand strategy for war and peace is called for to endure in the never-ending struggle for power, land, and resources. As A.J.P. Taylor...
From the October 2015 issue of Chronicles. “Every great man nowadays has his disciples,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” Even conceding that Wilde was writing for effect, it is nonetheless true that biographers often betray their subjects with either a kiss or a curse, and that the kiss...
Michael Wood begins with a quotation from Blake: “To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.” This line betokens his aim, which is to zero in on one small English place and use its specific saga to tell the wider tale of all England from prehistory to present. The place is Kibworth, an outwardly unremarkable...
World War II seems both near and far away. In one sense, it seems like only yesterday that I was 17 years old, in uniform, and in Georgia and California. In another sense, that period is ancient history. We have traversed a century or more in human experience since the early 1940’s. The conflict was...
“Every nation has the government it deserves.” Joseph de Maistre’s hard saying can give small comfort to Americans. Oh, it is true, we have a paper Constitution that promises a republican form of government, but all three branches of that government have for several generations conspired to evacuate the republican content from the system, leaving...
“The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child for the moon. It never has existed; it never will exist.” —Henry Clay During the closing days of the 1993 congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 300 of the nation’s leading economists, including two Nobel Laureates,...
Perhaps it was in retaliation for those fried potatoes that are served up in little bags and cartons at McDonald’s that they did it, that they performed an act which is so horribly outlandish. The French, those in question, have always been a very proud people; nowadays, the word French in English seems to be...
Talk about the economy is hotter than the coffee served at the truck stop in West Memphis, the third countertop we’ve visited in the last 12 hours. It’s the graveyard shift, and the waitresses are filling the half-gallon thermoses as fast as truckers can place them on the counter. The Java Cows in the kitchen...
Only the most devoted students of Henry Adams are likely to have bought and read the six-volume Complete Letters that Harvard University Press produced between 1982 and 1988. More’s the pity, since it was an excellent work of scholarship disclosing an American epistolary artist of the highest order. But the editor and biographer, Ernest Samuels,...
Beneath all the sanctimony about Trump’s “crimes,” the left knows, and we know, that his conviction is an exercise of power, not justice.
My two earlier commentaries on resistance films—movies that portray the heroism of outnumbered people under brutal invasion by great powers—brought forth a good deal of attention and discussion. It might be worth continuing the theme a little longer. For me it is a high priority of faith that every genuine nation, no matter how small...
In 1920, when Rose Wilder Lane met Dorothy Thompson, Lane was 33 and working in Paris, writing publicity stories for the American Red Cross. She had started out in California at the San Francisco Bulletin; written biographies of Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, and Jack London; and she would go on to be one of the...
The gap between Middle Americans and our cultural elite is nowhere wider than on questions of crime and punishment. While activists on the bench and in academia have crafted ever more rights and privileges for those accused and even convicted of crimes, they have given short shrift to the rights and welfare of current and...
“Thanatology” or “death education” now competes with driver’s ed and “social problems” for the attention of the nation’s high schoolers. First introduced on America’s college campuses in the 1960’s by such luminaries as Edgar Jackson, Richard Kalish, Robert Kastenbaum, and Herman Feifel, death education has, like many other dubious pedagogical experiments, trickled down to the...
The great conflicts of the future will no longer pit left against right, or East against West, but the forces of nationalism and regionalism against the credo of universal democracy. The lofty ideal of the global village seems to be stumbling over the renewed rise of East European separatism, whose aftershocks may soon spill over...
Communist poet Bertolt Brecht, after the 1953 risings in East Germany, suggested that the Communist government should just dissolve the people and elect a new one. That is essentially what is happening in the United States. The American government is dissolving the people and electing a new one—in the name of shoring up and “growing”...
In the wake of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signing the Parental Rights in Education bill into law, the internet has been ablaze with debate as to whether those who advocate for LGBT curricula and policies in public schools should be described as “groomers.” The left is predictably up in arms over this controversy. And although...
Monsignor Ronald Knox, when asked to conduct a baptismal service in the English language, replied that the Devil knew Latin, thus supplying a title for this lively, informative, and intelligent book. Many of its chapters have already appeared in periodicals, particularly Chronicles and Academic Questions. But five of them have been made by the addition...
The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is keeping pace with the rest of the Church in America as it embraces the usual causes and crusades under the banners of “community” and “equality” while all but shedding Catholic inconveniences like Mortal Sin and Sanctifying Grace. Apparently salvation now depends more on the sincerity of your handshake of peace...
Is it idle, or at least premature, to talk about “revolution from the right”? Whether it is or is not, that is exactly what leaders of the right have been talking about for some years, from Pat Buchanan’s “Middle American Revolution” and his imagery of the “Buchanan Brigades” and peasants with pitchforks rebelling against “King...
“You can observe a lot just by watching.” —Yogi Berra I call 2016 the Chronicles Election. The issues discussed in this magazine, often a lonely voice in the wilderness, for more than 30 years finally caught up with the national political discourse and got a president elected. They are bum trade deals, an eroding industrial...
I have never been a flag-waver, nor felt much sympathy for howling mobs, particularly when bent on destruction. But since this year, 1989, marks the bicentennial of the world’s first and most influential revolution (there is hardly a revolutionary notion or motif that cannot be traced back to Danton, Robespierre, Marat, Babeuf, and their spiritual...
My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education. It was all time wasted, less profitable than time wasted on politics. Politicians, to their credit, know that it...
A growing nationwide disdain for police officers has resulted from several highly publicized shootings of “unarmed” minority men who have resisted arrest or attacked officers. The media’s rhetoric has inflamed passions, resulting in the murders of two New York policemen seated in their cars, and the assassination of four Lakewood, Washington, officers eating in a...
You don’t have to read far into the story collection Thief of Lives before John Cheever’s name comes to mind, but after so many years of writing, Kit Reed must be used to that comparison. By now she should be replying: “Yes, but I write as well as that man did and occasionally even better....
Hail, Caesar Produced by Mike Zoss Productions and Working Title Films Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen Distributed by Universal Pictures In Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest film, Hail, Caesar!, we’re taken back to the Hollywood of the early 1950’s, lovingly recreated but set darkly askew. That was when the dream factories were...
The legacies of every war include controversy regarding its origins, its prosecution, its conclusion, and its material and political results. In the case of World War II, John Lukacs argues that among its major legacies was the Cold War, whose cause was the rigid division of Europe agreed upon by Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin...
The Deer Hunter received the Academy Award for best picture at the Oscars ceremony in 1979. The film was much criticized by some for its Russian roulette sequences, especially the alleged “racism” on display in the film’s depiction of the Viet Cong. But The Deer Hunter is truly a mythic, poetic work of art. The...
It is 10:00 P.M. as you step off the Greyhound bus in Laredo, Texas. By all rights you should feel exhausted after your 36-hour ride from Minneapolis. But the truth is, you feel pretty good. The air is cool but muggy on this late-August night. You are told that the Rio Grande is just a...
Revelations of a surprise supporting cast emerge in the Fani Willis Show, also known as the Trump trial in Georgia.
The following are excerpts translated from my latest interview with Sputnik News, which was broadcast live on July 19. Q:… What is happening to the freedom of speech in America? Are the current powers-that-be using secret services against journalists deemed troublesome, such as Tucker Carlson? … ST: Tucker Carlson’s evening show is the only mainstream media program...
COVID-19 vaccine may have arrived, but government lockdowns are far from over. On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson reinstated a strict lockdown in the United Kingdom, citing a surge in infections and hospitalizations fueled by what officials say is a more transmissible variant of the coronavirus. “It is clear that we need to do more...
A few days ago, rioters in Boston defaced the Robert Shaw Memorial, a masterpiece in high relief wrought by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whom I consider to be, alongside Frederic Remington, the most distinctly American of our sculptors. I am supposing that the attack on the memorial was no mere act of vandalism, no instance of “rioting mainly...
The Berlin wall may not be the only casualty of the Soviet Union’s disintegration. Recent elections in several European states have given evidence that nationalism is reemerging as the dominant political force in the West. Of course, “nationalism,” which in the broadest sense includes any assertion of tribal or national identity, is already the spark...
“The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child for the moon. It never has existed; it never will exist.” —Henry Clay During the closing days of the 1993 congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 300 of the nation’s leading economists, including two Nobel Laureates,...
Loyal Americans are still winning the battles but losing the war. Fifteen years ago, American troops were victorious in every major engagement in the jungles of Southeast Asia, but all their efforts came to nothing, because the Presidents who committed us to war (Kennedy and Johnson) never formulated a strategy for victory and be cause...
It may or may not make sense for the living to think in arbitrary terms of decades, centuries, and millennia; what is certain is, the dead don’t. Edward Abbey had been deceased just two months short of ten years and I was defunct about four months, entombed that long in the overpopulated, electronicized, ideologized megasprawl...
A poet’s critical prose holds interest for many people. Scholars examine it for clarifications or contradictions of the poet’s verse, admiring readers for echoes of the language that captivated them in the poetry, to which students and new readers may want some kind of “authorized introduction.” When writing about the work of others poets reveal...
The social justice warriors are at war against Western civilization. They rail against “white supremacy” because they see white people as inextricably bound with that civilization.
If humility is the skandalon of Neopagans, they typically base their more pragamatic case against Christianity on its suppose opposition to what pagan cultures regarded as the legitimate use of violence: personal self-defense, defensive war, and the execution of murderers, rapists, traitors, and other serious malefactors. They are entirely wrong, ...
From the December 1991 issue of Chronicles. In 1920, when Rose Wilder Lane met Dorothy Thompson, Lane was 33 and working in Paris, writing publicity stories for the American Red Cross. She had started out in California at the San Francisco Bulletin; written biographies of Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, and Jack London; and she would...
A generation arose and took its place in the life of Russia, which did witness Boris Nemtsov as a political heavyweight. The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, vice-premier, who was seen as an heir to Yeltsin, breathtaking ascension in his political career, and an ability to make country-wide policy—all this left Boris Nemtsov together...