Springfield's history provides important context for Donald Trump's wild tales of pet-eating Haitian emigres.
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Fading Into Arabian Nights
As the shock of American cluster bombs and the distinctive rumble of Abrams tanks fade from the Arabian nights, we world-citizens must begin to sort through the events of the last eight months. Many lessons could be drawn. Allow me to suggest two. First, it seemed clear by the sixth week of open combat that...
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Home Rule
The city-state is the seedbed of civilization, but the concept seems alien to the American tradition. Nonetheless, our cities did once possess, at least before the Revolution, many of the same rights enjoyed by English and European burgs. In the Anglo-American world, the liberties of cities were defined by the charters they received either from...
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Polish-German Reconciliation in an Historic Town
On August 29, 2004, just before my departure from Poland, I attended an important ceremony at the small, historic town of Nieszawa, which lies near the Vistula River, about 200 kilometers northwest of Warsaw, in the Kujawy-Pomorze (Kuyavia-Pomerania) region or Voivodeship (Wojewodztwo). It was a sunny and rather hot day. The town, which currently has...
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Memories and Modernity in Kasbah Country
I first visited Morocco in January 1943 as a young officer affected, with others, to the Casablanca Conference; it was considered sack time, after sterner service in the Western Desert, so called, or Libya. Originally it was to have been between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, but Uncle Joe, as both called the Russian dictator, sulked...
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Tommy Flanagan
Early one evening in the mid-1980’s, jazz pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., who in 1951-52 had performed and recorded with star bebop alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, was having a bad first set at Bradley’s, New York City’s premier jazz piano bar. Bishop’s sense of time was off, he was missing notes, and he even seemed disoriented...
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Mayday
Last night’s quip went round the country: “Theresa May fell on her sword—but missed.” She is indeed, like Charles II, an unconscionable time dying. That monarch however went on—though not for long—to say that he hoped they would excuse it. No such hope for May: she is already arraigned at the bar of public opinion...
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Chopin’s Life and Times
Alan Walker has insisted, at the very beginning of his massive new biography of Chopin, that the composer has today a unique global reputation and appeal. And when we consider the evidence that justifies his claims, we must admit that this evidence is most impressive—and also that some of it is the opposite: doubtful and...
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The World Cannot Afford an Unserious America
The world, and U.S. citizens in particular, need a serious America. But thanks to our government’s refusal to secure our border, the idea of America being a serious country is a relic of a bygone era.
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Assyrian Genocide: Ongoing and Forgotten
The recent massacres and expulsions of Iraqi Christians are only the latest chapter in the genocide of the ancient and exclusively Christian Assyrians, a continuation of the bloody campaign that took place in the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Iraq throughout the 20th Century. The Chaldean Catholics who are bearing the brunt of IS attacks in...
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Now He Knows the Rest of the Story
“Hello, Americans. This is Paul Harvey. Stand by for . . . news!” His voice was arguably the most recognized in the history of radio. His broadcasting career lasted over three quarters of a century, from his days as a high-school intern at KVOO in his native Tulsa, Oklahoma, until 2009. Yet few of the...
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His Land, His People
“Dickinson was, in truth,” writes William Murchison, as much philosopher as writer, a man to whom God had imparted the gifts not merely of expression but also of examination and reflection. Among the large fraternity active in the cause of independence, he gave place, intellectually, to no one. That being indisputably the case, Dickinson’s inclusion...
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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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Reflections on Chronicles
The March issue (“Against Ideology”) was a brilliantly perceptive one, notably as it stresses the utmost importance, for any true conservative, of defending loyalties to local mores and traditions, small hometowns and family farms, regional cultures—things that have passed the test of time and matter most to real people. With such ideas I could not...
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Running the Big Khan in Philly
If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, Scoundrel Time to the nth degree was on full display in Philadelphia last week. The closing days of the Democratic Convention featured an orgy of frenzied flag-waving (never mind the minimal presence of Old Glory at the opening) and orchestrated chants of “USA! USA! USA!” (doing double...
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Why the Right Needs Trump to Win
Right-wing critics of Trump are foolish if they think there is any future for the issues they care about without a Trump win in November.
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Henry Regnery, R.I.P.
He died on June 18, his devoted wife of six decades, Eleanor, at his side. Soft-spoken, humble, ever polite and generous, Henry was also a man of indomitable courage. In an era of accelerating centralization in the book trade, he launched the Henry Regnery Company in 1947 as an independent publishing house. From the beginning,...
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Idling, Week 1
Idling: A Public and Entirely Self-Serving Diary 1 September 4,2011. A few words by way of justification for wasting time, mine as much as yours, on talking about nothing. I have always been by inclination an idle man, the sort who is too lazy to balance his checkbook or do his taxes until the...
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Methodists and Sex
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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Go Figure
“A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.” —William Shakespeare In preparing my review of this riveting biography, I gathered samples of what has recently been written about Richard M. Nixon, and I must say they make a bewildering collection. Here are a few: “A monster of a million disguises.” Andrew Kopkind, the...
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Utopias Unlimited
The future has been all the rage for the past two centuries. Modernism, as an ideology, might almost be defined as the cult of the future, whether in science fiction or in Utopian political creeds like Marxism. Even in its death throes modernism was able to spawn “futurology,” a pseudo-science as richly comic as phrenology....
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Foreign Policy for the Post-Cold War World
Nineteen eighty-nine was a year of great joy for lovers of freedom everywhere. For it was the “revolutionary” year in which totalitarian communism, throughout Eastern Europe and perhaps even in the Soviet Union itself, suddenly collapsed like a house of cards. Many of our pundits, equating complexity and permanent quasi-gloom with profundity, sternly warned us...
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Whispers From Kirk
Stan Evans has described bodies of thought as having “lifecycles”; they emerge, thrive for a while, and, unless continually nourished, eventually hollow out and pass away. Having reached the end of its lifecycle, liberalism, as a coherent body of thought, is dead. There are still liberals, of course. But the tradition derived variously from John...
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The Perfect Life
It is possibly a good thing that more writers are not sportsmen and outdoorsmen. The relationship between art and sport is a complexly curious one, since a case can be made for a sporting element in writing that is, of course, wholly cerebral (though not necessarily noncompetitive and nonviolent). In writing, as in the nonliterary...
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Lepanto: A Category of the Spirit
There are days and places in history when time seems to stand still and, in the space of a moment, the fate of future centuries is decided. At dawn on October 7, 1571, the spectacle would have made a strong impression on anyone who looked out at the waters breaking upon the straits that join...
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Confederate Rainbow
As we all know, during the Civil War, an expansive, democratic, progressive, multiethnic North defeated a bigoted and reactionary South, so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth. Like so many commonly held beliefs about the war (which are now being enforced as official,...