Though some students have found learning at home relieves them of school’s social stresses, many others miss their teachers, classmates, and the routine of the school day. Some of the little ones have become more defiant and have reverted to bed-wetting, while many older students suffer from depression. In “The Children of Quarantine: What does...
When you visit a foreign capital for the first time, sooner or later you are likely to be asked the question: “What do you think of our country?” or “What is your impression of this city?” In St. Petersburg, which I had visited in May, I had a ready answer: Everything there (the worst as...
“Lord, he looks so peaceful,” Miss Alice said tearfully. I braced myself for a long two hours at my post—and that was before the funeral started. Interrupting my thoughts, she looked up at me and spoke in a whisper that was loud enough for Pastor Brown, who was standing on the other side of the...
“Name one.” —Anonymous Too bad that, since 1966, they are no longer adding titles to the Index of Prohibited Books. My more than ten years as diocesan censor librorum—was it this past distinction that gained me the happy task of writing this review?—would lead me to grant Thomas Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering...
Liberalism’s Glorious Age of parliamentary democracy, nation building and national consolidation, free trade, and empire, of which Great Britain was the chief power and paramount symbol, reached a catastrophic close in 1914. After 1945, liberalism in renovated form attempted to launch a modern Glorious Age dominated by the Pax Americana and the United Nations and...
All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I walk into a crowded room wearing a...
I have a friend, a Boston thoracic surgeon, who has a great sensitivity for issues concerning the meaning of life and the nature of man. It’s easy to understand how a man who spends the best part of his busy days at the pressure-packed juncture of life and death could become absorbed in philosophical thought....
Beirut’s occupation in 1983 by U.S. Marines may provide a small-scale sample of what a prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq could be like, should the Pollyannaish postwar scenarios of some members of the War Party fail to materialize. Of course, the two situations are, in some ways, very different. Beirut, for instance, is just a...
One of the little-remarked phenomena of modern popular music is the fact that the familial tradition evident 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s (e.g. the Mills Brothers, the Andrews Sisters, Steve and Edie) continues on. Merciful impulses insist that the Partridge Family and Sonny and Cher are expunged from consideration. The Davies brothers, Ray and Dave, of...
“Among the many priests of Jove . . . all passed muster that could hide Their sloth, avarice, and pride.” —Bernard Mandeville Bruno Rizzi’s La Bureaucratisation du Monde, first published in Paris in 1939 and Part I of which is here translated by Adam Westoby into English for the first time, is the obscure work...
The modern age has known many false prophets who have challenged the moral and spiritual beliefs of the Christian faith. Although churchmen have not always been vigilant in defense of traditional religion, one institution able to resist the secularizing trends of the 19th and 20th century has been the Catholic Church. But it has not...
Bugsy Produced by Mark Johnson Written by James Toback Directed by Barry Levinson Released by Tri-Star Pictures Meeting Venus Produced by David Puttnam Written by István Szabó and Michael Hirst Directed by István Szabó Released by Warner Brothers Gangster movies show us an are, the parabolic rise and fall of a career where ambition comes...
The event known as the accident at Chernobyl will be remembered by history for the scarcity of contemporary information about it in the world at large, a degree of ignorance far more remarkable than the event itself. The event, after all, was diagnosed as an accident, which made it interesting to the antinuclear left; was...
The human universe, we are told by optimists on the editorial pages, is contracting into a gray and insipid doughball, pasted over with brightly colored labels advertising the only ethnic rivalries that persist: the struggles between Nissan and Daimler, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Unfortunately, there are people around the world who do not read...
Basically, the Yugoslav problem is simple: it is a war of vanities, of various ethnic and religious groups vying for supremacy. If this sounds familiar to American and other Western readers, the parallel is intentional: after all, it was Tito, the arch-communist, who first implemented the New World Order of former President George Bush, of...
Writing her column the other day in a London newspaper, a feminist confessed that the women’s movement that started some 25 years ago had “spluttered to a halt.” Many a middle-aged feminist nowadays will tell you the same thing. The young, they will say with an air of regret, meaning their daughters and the friends...
Boris Johnson bolted back from his Caribbean holiday, under the naïve assumption that the Brits were having an election, rather than a coronation for Rishi Sunak.
Years after his arrest by the Soviet authorities, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, while recuperating in a prison hospital after a cancerous tumor had been cut from his body, cast out the last remnant of a spiritual tumor from his soul. A prison doctor, soon to die by the hand of another zek, “fervently” recounted to Solzhenitsyn his...
How do I get a grant? You first must get an application. Forget about those grants for which you cannot apply, such as MacArthur Fellowships, which are essentially designed for people already known, which is to say celebrities, or incipient celebrities. Once you get the application, read its guidelines carefully to make sure you qualify...
“A crocodile has been worshipped,” wrote John Taylor of Caroline, “and its priesthood have asserted, that morality required the people to suffer themselves to be eaten by the crocodile.” Such was his final judgment on the central government of the United States and the advocates of its power. This prophecy, if such it may be...
For the financial crisis that has wiped out trillions in wealth, many have felt the lash of public outrage. Fannie and Freddie. The idiot-bankers. The AIG bonus babies. The Bush Republicans and Barney Frank Democrats who bullied banks into making mortgages to minorities who could not afford the houses they were moving into. But the...
I got a call from a Washington-based journalist the other day who wanted to know if Pat Buchanan had any influence on the platform of our current President. What a question! The guy sounded fairly young—at least, younger than me—so he doesn’t remember. Yes, but aren’t there books, articles, easily accessible on the internet? Has...
From front cover to back, the total “package” of George Garrett’s new novel, Poison Pen, is a shuck and a con. No fictional work in recent memory is so elaborate a satire, and a reader would have to go back to the 18th-century Augustans to find its equal. To begin with, the jacket’s slick black...
“The market may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade its heroisms, as well as war.” —John Ruskin We were two old parties, my visiting brother and I, sitting under the grape arbor at the end of a mild summer day. When I say “two old parties,” however, in the manner of...
In February 1941, the world was at war. Nazism and fascism ruled virtually all of Europe and parts of Africa. Imperial Japan was poised to conquer much of East Asia. Joseph Stalin still controlled the world’s largest land mass, although Hitler was soon to shake Stalin’s throne. That year, Pitirim A. Sorokin, born in 1889,...
The governor of Florida must translate his ideological agenda into its emotional equivalent, not with this or that policy proposal but with language that speaks to raw feeling.
“Trade without frontiers”—when the European Economic Community talks about barrier-free trade, the wall begins at Spain and the US is left on the wrong side of it, as the Bush administration, which has supported the coming federation of Europe, is beginning to discover. In October the EEC voted 10 to 2 to adopt a set...
“The Anglo-Saxon carries self-government and self-development with him wherever he goes.” —Henry Ward Beecher For almost exactly 30 years, Kevin P. Phillips has been cranking out some of the most interesting and provocative works of political analysis written since World War II. In 1969, The Emerging Republican Majority argued that American politics runs through periodic...
In the midst of the ongoing brutal war in Gaza, there is something disturbingly dishonest and self-abasing about Americans claiming Israel’s military is “the most moral on Earth.”
“Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish . . . ” —Psalm 2:12 Twenty-one centuries will have passed since He promised to come in His glory, 21 centuries since His prophet wrote, “Behold, I come quickly.” For centuries, then, men had beseeched Him with faith and fervor, “O Lord our God hasten...
On June 17, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and murdered 9 of the innocent people he found there. Seizing on the fact that Roof had posed in one picture with a Confederate battle flag, many politicians and media personalities immediately demanded that the Confederate battle flag come down. South Carolina...
A story long popular in London tells of a foreign visitor losing his bearings while walking along Whitehall and politely asking a passerby, “Excuse me, sir, which side is the Foreign Office on?” Hearing the visitor’s accent, the Brit despairingly replies, “Yours, probably.” This story comes to mind when we read the histories of Western...
If is ironic that the thoughts of this essay, extracted from a commencement address I gave at Claremont McKenna College in the spring of 1987, celebrate an old Stanford University tradition of submerging all students in the classical thought of the West as a precondition to graduation, no matter what their major. This spring of...
“Arrogance and boldness belong to those that are accursed of God.” —Saint Clement of Rome After the end of the Cold War, reasonable people might have expected the United States to withdraw from her many foreign commitments and become a normal country again. Yet the opposite has happened. Rather than dissolve, NATO has expanded. Instead...
Frustration Joyce Carol Oates: Mysteries of Winterthurn; E. P. Dutton; New York. When it’s literary gee-whiz time, people like Isaac Asimov — the man who produces books, stories, and essays the way that McDonald’s cranks out Big Macs, fries, and Cokes — are trotted out. In the face of Asimov, many literate persons, most of...
The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat; Avid Reader Press; 272 pp., $27.00 The ancient latin aphorism per aspera ad astra (“through rough things, to the stars”) might well be a fitting epigraph for New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s latest book. Its cover features a 19th century French illustration of Rabelais’ Gargantua et Pantagruel being fed...
This renowned and deeply flawed historian’s misguided FDR worship should be rejected as propaganda.
“Party for a book? I’d love to,” I mutter to my host as we land in Sodom. Five days of vacation lie before me, and as we drive to the place—”Where the old McAlpin used to be, downtown,” the limousine driver reminisces—it is pleasant to think that people here still publish books. After a ride...
Even more than Vachel Lindsay, who liked to say that the Mason-Dixon line ran straight through his heart, Booth Tarkington embodied the regional conflict that defined the Midwest. Born in Indianapolis only five years after the end of the war between the regions, Newton Booth Tarkington was descended on his father’s side from Southern Democrats...
We saw them at dawn: a dozen men in ragged camouflage, lugging dull black weapons glinting like poised snakes. Their faces rugged like Arizona bluffs, dark brown or brick red, they moved without a sound, like the mist rolling out of the forest. Large and beefy, they stood around our campfire and smiled at us....
There is a story told about the late Roland Barthes. Once, in his Paris seminar on critical theory, a British visitor bravely remarked that something he had just said sounded rather like a point made by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria. An embarrassed silence followed. Then Barthes, in his ponderous voice, spoke: “One can never...
Somewhere between Muddy Gap and the old uranium town of Jeffrey City I became aware of my lungs, painfully expanding and contracting inside my denim shirt. Beyond Jeffrey City the smoke cloud was visible to the northwest, a pinkish-grey mass hanging on the mountainous horizon and planed along its upper edge by atmospheric winds: large...
The mystery novel, to borrow a line from Original Sin, has all the virtues of its defects. “The mystery,” Baroness James explained in a recent Washington Post interview, “deals with the planned murder” and is thus confined to a certain formulaic structure in which a detective protagonist confronts an often unsavory lot of suspects, all...
Bias crimes will no longer be tolerated in New York City, say the proponents of the city’s new “bias crimes” statute. Its sponsors call it one of the toughest such laws in the nation, and it will for the first time allow judges to award unlimited punitive damages to victims of bias attacks, as well...
“All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun.” —Jean-Luc Godard In 1947, an executive director of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals deplored the “sizable doses of communist propaganda” in many films of the day. Leaving aside the question of whether “American ideals” could be identified—much...
“O Fame, O Fame! Many a man ere this Of no account hast thou set up on high.” —Boethius “It is a kind of baby talk, a puerile and wind-blown gibberish. . . . In content it is a vacuum.” —H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding’s speeches Americans are a practical people. They don’t want...
Does the public stock market actually serve a purpose? To some free-market zealots, the answer is obvious: The public markets increase liquidity, and this enables fledgling businesses to get off the ground by allowing them access to capital. Moreover, we can all reap the benefits of capitalism’s “creative destruction” and become a nation of investors...
The Obama Administration’s Middle Eastern policy is irrational and detrimental to American interests in the region. The decision to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt is the strategic equivalent of Emperor Nicholas I Romanov’s support for the Habsburgs in suppressing the Hungarian revolution in 1849. The cost of that geopolitical blunder was...
I am writing this very close to March 20, the 15th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, and I’m wondering: Have we learned anything from that experience? One has only to look at the headlines to understand that no, we haven’t learned anything from the experience of being lied into war by a...
Many Americans today are baffled by the Third Amendment to the Constitution, the one in which the quartering of troops in private homes is prohibited in times of peace, except by the consent of the owner. Quartering troops in time of war was allowed, but only as regulated by law. Some of the amendments in...