Sometimes historical scholarship tells us more about the present than about the past. In June 2005, an exhibit of Omar ibn Said’s The Life, the only known autobiography written by an American black while in bondage, was on display in the lobby of the U.N. headquarters. What made it even more significant was that The...
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Those Oldies But Goodies
An Italian-American restaurant I count on features sound reasons for my presence there, and that of others. I like the tone in that environment. There is an aspect of 1950’s atmosphere—the place is quiet, the lighting subdued, and the manners polite. The menu is gratifying when the garlic is held in control, and the service...
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Lament for a Lost Love
Oh, England! How have I loved thee, even though most of my forebears came from the doubtful Scots and Welsh borders, and not a few were 17th-century refugees from the turmoil of the German states. I am old enough to remember when many, many of us regarded you as our Mother Country, despite all the...
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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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Eternal Memory
As we round the curve, the driver pulls up short—at least, as short as you can when you’re only going five miles per hour in the first place. As the minibus shudders to a halt, we all shift in our seats to get a better view out of the windshield. There, up ahead on the...
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Graydon Carter and the ‘Golden Age of Magazines’
The era of original, tough-minded, and seriously cultivated magazine journalism is over, replaced by an age of random digital ephemera.
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The President’s President
“Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment governs them.” —Chesterfield Richard Nixon’s second term as president ended over two years early with his resignation on August 9, 1974. Someday, when President Reagan’s papers and telephone logs are made public, I think they will reveal that Nixon completed his presidential term in the second Reagan...
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The Language of Literature
“Poets who lasting marble seek Should carve in Latin or in Greek.” When I last quoted those lines of Edmund Waller, I was put down as a hopeless reactionary trying to restore Latin as the language of literature. In the case of the conservative journalist who missed the point, it would have been enough to...
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Fascism, Real and Imagined
A personal and national narrative of resistance to globalism Twenty years ago I somehow managed to get my act together and get out of Paris, where I had haunted a cheap hotel for a year in the wake of the death of Princess Diana like the ghost of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango...
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The Latest Rage
“Real life” crime shows are the latest rage on American television. Feeding on this fury, there is now for sale an encyclopedia of crime, where one can examine the “true stories” of deranged persons like Jeffrey Dahmer. The first book in the series is titled Serial Killers and was out in time for last Christmas....
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Two Cultures
Four decades before Hillary Clinton coined the term “Deplorables,” Chronicles predicted how the battle lines in the culture war would be drawn.
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Ask an Entrepreneur
Want to learn how the economy really works? Don’t go into academia. Get a job. I spent six years of school filling my head with fancy theories and complicated mathematics, practiced under assumptions that often don’t work in the real world. I earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in economics, but where I...
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The Deliberate Infection Myth of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Arguing with my liberal high school teachers did not endear me to them. It got worse when a day or two after one of these disagreements I brought to class material demonstrating the teacher had been feeding us a false narrative. The teacher was not doing so intentionally but simply out of ignorance, having accepted a...
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Wyndham Lewis and the Moronic Inferno
Looking back today at the achievements of the heroic modernists, we must do so with at least some degree of ambivalence. The presence of those colossi has receded with the passing of the years; and we no longer regard them as they themselves taught us to do. Yet they still loom on the mental horizon,...
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A Jolt from the Slumber of the Self
Werner Herzog, in his new memoir, turns his attention to himself, and singles out essential elements of his life that have given birth to ideas, perceptions, and films.
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Witnessing at The Hague
All history is to some extent contemporary, but none more so than that analyzed, interpreted, and sometimes constructed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague. ...
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Beyond Left and Right
November 9, 1989, marked the end of the old politics and the old alignments; on that day, as the Berlin Wall fell, so did the political categories and alliances of half a century. The end of the Cold War meant a lot more than the end of communism as a viable ideology. It meant more...
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Tom and Sally and Joe and Fawn
The timing of Nature magazine’s “expose” of Thomas Jefferson’s alleged affair with his slave Sally Hemings received a great deal of press attention, coming as it did just before elections which were expected to determine a modern philandering president’s fate. At the same time, Joe Ellis, the author of the article, signed a full-page newspaper...
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The Crime of History
He who writes a nation’s history also controls its future—so wrote George Orwell. During the Soviet reign over Eastern Europe, every citizen knew who was in charge of writing history, especially that dealing with the victims of World War II. Anyone professing to be a Slovak, a Croat, a Ukrainian, or a Russian nationalist was...
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Feeding the Beast
When Angela Merkel became chancellor of Germany in late 2005, the conservative German newspaper Die Welt admitted that “Nobody knows in what direction she will take the country.” The liberal Berliner Zeitung was equally ignorant, wondering, “What will she be demanding from us citizens?” (In Europe, we have “democracies” of the kind in which politicians...
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Fuzzy Focus & Clear Vision
Every now and again a book appears which, despite its pervasive deficiencies, is destined to become a minor classic simply because it epitomizes the delusions of an epoch. Such, for example, were the bogus Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, a compendium of medieval credulity about men who walked on their heads or had eyes in their...
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True Grit
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
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John-John Is My Co-Pilot
Aside from the non-resignation and non-ruin of President Clinton and the non-campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, the biggest non-event of 1999 was undoubtedly the non-survival last summer of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who, true to the traditions of his family, managed to seize international headlines when his own recklessness and incompetence led to disaster—this...
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Remembering Donald Davidson
Lewis P. Simpson, in his memorable preface to The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, evoked Thomas Carlyle’s description of Robert Burns to hail Davidson’s own achievement. Burns, wrote Carlyle, was a “piece of right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;—rock, yet with wells of living...
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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 on nearby Nagasaki, killing approximately 39,000 people....
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Our Sacred Anticanon
I arrived a few minutes late for the meeting with the hippie roofer. Two many DUIs had cost him his driver’s license, and I had to take him to the home-improvement store. “Been to church?” he asked. Dressed in a suit at 10:30 on Sunday morning, I was forced to admit the fact. “I’ve read...
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A Model for the West
Ciechocinek lies about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, near Torun, the birthplace of Nicolaus Copernicus, in the Kujawy-Pomorze (Kuyavia-Pomerania) region. It is a spa and resort town of about 14,000 permanent residents, known for its unique titration towers—large wooden structures with thick layers of bramble, through which water from nearby salt springs is filtered into...
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A Cultural Evening in Grenada
During the four-and-one-half years of Cuban hegemony in Grenada, I often had cause to cross a country road from my house on the Pointe Salines peninsula to the Headquarters of the DGI (Directorio General de Intelegencia) to complain about the noise. Would they please turn down the altavoz or speaker system beaming Castro’s speeches at...
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For Better and For Worse
That Christmas was, in every respect, the horror Héctor had feared it would be. Homesick, broke, unchurched (AveMaría, after the second round-trip drive to the Assemblies of God church in Lordsburg, had decided to hold a Sunday prayer service at home instead), cooped together like rats in a cage, the Villas, with the Juárezes, endured...
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The Diner’s Refrain
With former president Bill Clinton settled into his new headquarters on New York’s 125th Street, in central Harlem, the danger for the culinary crowd is that he may now take to hanging out at Sylvia’s, the famous soul-food restaurant barely three blocks away on Lenox Avenue near 126th. For almost 40 years, the family-owned restaurant...
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Chained Bible
The Church of England is now a citadel of advanced liberalism. It went over to secularism long ago, and its zealots intensify their hold upon doctrine and practice. The charge sheet includes, but is not confined to, support for the transgender lobby, for illegal immigrants, and for pandenominational movements. The Church smiles upon the “marriage”...
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West Point Gives in to Creeping Liberalism
By abandoning its traditional motto of “Duty, Honor, Country,” West Point has given into the liberalizing trend within American society. As Samuel Huntington warned, to remain effective a military must maintain an ethos distinct from the liberal society it defends.
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The Forgotten Oath of Congress
According to my online dictionary, an oath is “a solemn promise, often invoking a divine witness, regarding one’s future action or behavior.” Oaths play a big role in our society. The Boy Scouts, known today as Scouts BSA since admitting girls to the organization, begin their weekly meetings by raising their right hand in the...
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Are the Good Times Really Over?
In mid-September, the original campus of Rockford’s Barber-Colman Company was named an historic district and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a fitting end to one of Rockford’s best-known manufacturing sites. Founded in 1900, the Barber-Colman Company gradually built the 15-building plant between Rock and River Streets, by the very ford in...
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The Chechen War Far From Over
The Chechen War, as the Russian leadership discovered in early March, is far from over. On the night of March 2, a convoy of nine trucks, carrying about 100 Internal Ministry special forces troops from Grozny to the strategically important crossroads village of Pervomayskava, was ambushed by an estimated 40 Chechen boyevikiy (“fighters” or “warriors”)....
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Pire qu’un Crime . . .
“Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honour, all things fade. Save Treason and the dagger of her trade . . . “ —Oscar Wilde, “Libertatis Sacra Fames” The Pollard treason case is so unusual that I want to start my review of this book with a review of the reviews. I do this because the first-hand story by...
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Treason Against the New Order
I was doing my best to mind my own business on a very busy Saturday. My wife was in England, and after nearly two weeks of playing mother, I was catching up on the laundry, shopping for the dinner I would have to prepare, and, in between trips to the store, I had to take...
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Who Is Pete Schaub?
When Pete Schaub, a business major in his senior year at the University of Washington at Seattle, couldn’t get into an overenrolled business course for the first quarter of 1988, he signed up for “Women 200: Introduction to Women Studies” instead. He was expecting to learn about “the history of women and the contributions that...
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Real Jews
Exploration of the relationship between Jews and America is far from complete, at least among Jewish conservatives, who do not rely on their religious traditions as explicitly as do some among the Christian right. There has been some speculation in Jewish circles that the reason Jews in America have prospered is because both Judaism and...
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Bo Gritz and Middle America
“You want to go see Bo Gritz burn the U.N. flag?” My libertarian neighbor Bill, during the final days of the last presidential campaign, was making me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I have always been half-frustrated by mv failure to take advantage of all those radical activities in my college days during the 60’s....
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The Cajuns of Louisiana
In the 1980’s, “Cajun” suddenly became “cool.” From rotund Chef Paul Prudhomme and high-rolling Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards to the music of Beausoleil and “blackened” redfish, anyone and anything associated with the remnants of French culture along the Gulf Coast was “in.” The nation eagerly embraced the battle-cry of the Cajun: “Let the good times...
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Showdown at Gettysburg
Sitting through a showing of the recent film Gettysburg in a multiplex theater amid the abstract sprawl of suburban Yankeedom was somehow an unnerving experience. I don’t mean to say that the movie itself was off-putting or unsuccessful, though come to think of it, there were a few awkward moments here and there. No, the...
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“All Men Are Created Equal”
“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . .” The necessity has occurred. The 13 colonies have a long history as self-governing societies, a condition that is now threatened. As all governments derive their just powers from...
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Poor Mexico, Poor America: Extracts Omitted
I foolishly used an early version of my article. Rather than repost everything, I am putting in a few omitted extracts: Introduction“Poor Mexico,” sighed Porfirio Diaz, “so far from God, so close to the United States.” Though a hero in the Battle of Puebla (May 5, 1862) in which the Mexicans defeated French troops supporting...
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Marriage and the Law
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s 4-3 ruling, in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, that the Massachusetts constitution—if not the federal Constitution—requires the state to allow same-sex marriages has thrown nearly everyone into a good old-fashioned tizzy. The Massachusetts court somehow discovered that it was “arbitrary” and “capricious” and therefore legally impermissible to limit the...
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Sidney Poitier and the Civilizing Act
Sydney Poitier’s films were mature examinations of blackness in American life. Unlike those who followed him, he demonstrated that acting civilized way is not a class or race privilege, but a human obligation.
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Daffodils for Wordsworth
The name Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is a wonderfully poetic one, conjuring an image of a lover of horses on a carefree adventure. Such, however, is far from the temperament of this 20th-century poet, whose poetry is more suggestive of some horse in a Dickens novel, harnessed to an industrial wheel and moving forever round in...
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All That Jazz
I greatly enjoyed and appreciate Tony Outhwaite’s recent tribute to George Shearing (“No Apologies for Jazz,” Cultural Revolutions, April). Well done. In late 1954 or early 1955 I twice traveled from my assignment at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois, to the University at Champaign-Urbana to hear some live jazz. The first time, it...
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One More Wallow In Fantasy?
The Patriot, Mel Gibson’s epic about the American Revolution, opened (by an amazing coincidence) in theaters on Independence Day weekend. And cynics complain that Americans don’t take national holidays seriously anymore! Many viewers may regard the film as one more wallow in fantasy and stale popcorn, but among the nation’s literati, it has actually incited...
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Time
“I wanna go back and do it all over But I can’t go back I know I wanna go back ’cause I’m feeling so much older But I can’t go back I know” —Popular song by Eddie Money (1986, CBS Inc.) Mostly we take space for granted so long as we have enough of it....