To a world of parched souls, Jesus Christ offered the Water of Life. Unlike club soda, however this Water is not a good mixer: in order to refresh, it must be taken straight, and on the Rock For centuries, men have attempted to concoct heady new “Christianity-and-” brews, but the disappointing result is always temporary...
“In these days a great capitalist has deeper roots than a sovereign prince, unless he is very legitimate.” —Benjamin Disraeli Appearing just in time for the Enron and WorldCom scandals and the ensuing stock-market plunge, Kevin Phillips’ harsh new scrutiny of the trends toward the concentration of wealth and power in the emerging American social...
It is 1923, hot on the heels of the Progressive era and World War I. Radio Broadcast magazine confidently opines that the advent of radio as a popular medium “is destined, economically and politically, to bind us together more firmly.” It might even produce “to some extent at least, unification of the religious ideas of...
Americans find it difficult to understand the Islamic threat. It is not just that they have made the mistake of listening to presidential speeches on the “religion of peace” or dulled their wits reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The fault does not lie exclusively or even primarily with American schools,...
In my institution I have been sharply critical of the public relations attempts at self-justification and self-elevation in the interest of the community’s largess, the larger grants of public money to support a larger and larger institution. I have been particularly critical of my school’s official insistence that its primary concern is with “new knowledge,”...
I met Joe Sobran in 1973 when I was working as history editor at St. Martin’s Press and had begun writing for National Review. I don’t remember how exactly, but the occasion must have been one of the open-house cocktail parties at the magazine’s offices at 150 East 35th Street, held every other Wednesday evening...
“When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to.” So predicted Boston University’s Paula Fredriksen in one of the opening salvos in the year-long campaign to kill Mel Gibson’s film masterpiece, The Passion of the Christ—a campaign that was, in equal measure, hysterical, disingenuous, ignorant,...
To pick up Tales of the Big Game Hunters is to suffer instant culture shock. The book plunges us into a world in which animals are slaughtered for the ivory, the skins, the racks, and the wonderful dangerous pleasure of the chase and kill. The British imperium is at its height, white supremacy unquestioned by...
Item: An American of Greek origin calls a congressional office to protest United States policies in Bosnia that would place Christian Serbs at the mercy of a hostile Muslim regime. “So-called Christians,” corrects a member of the congressman’s staff, ignorant of the caller’s religion. Item: A national opinion magazine carries on its cover a harsh...
What follows is an attempt to portray not the typical statesman, as he repeatedly appeared in the course of Western history up to yesterday, but the average professional politician of our times, the man (or woman) whose chosen trade is to govern his (or her) fellow citizens. Any ruler must somehow be subordinate to the...
In the cathedrals of New York and Rome There is a feeling that you should just go home And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is People understand catastrophes. The everyday ebb and flow of history, in their own lives and in the world, is much harder for them to grasp. That thought—hardly...
It was years ago that I first read the collection of Donald Davidson’s essays called Still Rebels, Still Yankees. In one of them, “Some Day, in Old Charleston,” the doughty Last Agrarian addressed one of his perennial themes, the trashiness of modern civilization and the superiority of the Old Southern regime, by describing Charleston’s Army...
“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov Winter came early in the year after the Fall. All the people’s hopes and dreams and expansive aspirations had not yet faded,...
Midatlantic It has been a long day for this straight European male. O’Hare Airport is a decompression chamber between Middle America and the rest of the world: rude United clerks who act as if they own the airline; the gauntlet of guards at the X-ray machines, none of whom is able to speak English; and...
Several Nazi concentration camps, as I explained in a recent Chronicles article called “Buchenwald’s Second Life” (July 1989), were used by the Soviet occupying authorities in East Germany for some five years after the war, and for their original purpose. That was once a secret, but we are now in a wholly new age. Some...
“Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.” —Friedrich Nietzsche Most Americans, whether they know it or not, are already well acquainted with lost causes; as for the rest, they have only to wait, perhaps for just a little while. T.S. Eliot thought no...
Machiavelli, in answer to the question of whether a prince should prefer gold or arms, replied that arms were the logical choice since gold could not always buy a strong military but a strong military could usually acquire wealth. This answer had not changed three and a half centuries later when Kipling wrote, “Gold for...
On October 25, 2000, central Sydney’s traffic stood still for hours, for the first time since the Olympiad. Inside the late-Victorian Town Hall, approximately 2,000 pilgrims witnessed the Aboriginal faith’s latest canonization: the state funeral of Charles Perkins, who had died on October 18 after 29 years of daily medical dependence on the “whitefella” culture...
“The thing is to squeeze the last drop out of the medium you have learned to use. The aim is not essentially different from the aim of Greek tragedy, but we are dealing with a public that is only semi-literate and we have to make an art out of a language...
John C. Calhoun was the last great American statesman. A statesman must be something of a prophet—one who has an historical perspective and says what he believes to be true and in the best long-range interest of the people, whether it is popular or not. A politician, which is all we have now, says and...
At the Heart of Darkness by Samuel Francis • September 24, 2009 • Printer-friendly “The New Englanders are a people of God, settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories.”—Cotton Mather H.P. Lovecraft: A Biography by S.T. JoshiWest Warwick, Rhode Island:Necronomicon Press; 704 pp., $20.00 H.P. Lovecraft: Miscellaneous WritingsEdited by S.T. JoshiSank City, Wisconsin:Arkham...
The literature in the English language on various long-established communities eradicated by the horrors of the 20th century is largely dominated by the Jewish holocaust. Accounts of other disappeared communities—of Italians in today’s Croatia, the Poles of Galicia, the Serbs of the former Habsburg Military Border, or Germans everywhere east of the Oder-Neisse line—are available...
“I don’t just renovate,” says Nicole Curtis, the 36-year-old star of Rehab Addict. “I restore old houses to their former glory.” She’s a willowy blonde with the body of a pinup model and the determination of a drill sergeant—and she can wield a nail gun as well as any man, if not better. That may...
“The earth outside is covered with snow and I am covered with sweat. My younger brother calls me a killer and my daddy calls me a vet.” So the Vietnam veteran appears in a popular song recorded a few years back by Charlie Daniels (written by Dan Daley). The Vietnam War is over, but the...
Patricia Highsmith is a peculiar taste, nasty and unpalatable to many. Readers who like her, however, tend to like her enormously. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, the unwanted daughter of a graphic artist who attempted to abort her by drinking turpentine. Her father left home before she was born, and she...
“I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you.” So said Nadine Collier, who lost her mother in the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, offering forgiveness to Dylann Roof, who confessed to the atrocity that took the lives of nine churchgoers at that Wednesday night prayer...
Embracing both, and rejecting the United States of Now. Allen Tate, in 1952, argued that the first duty of the man of letters in the postwar world was to purify the language from the corruptions introduced by ideology and the destruction, more than physical, wrought by the recent world war. He was not the only...
DESFIREX, the Desert Firing Exercise, is a semi-annual celebration of cordite, steel, white phosphorous, and sand held at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twenty Nine Palms, California. During the weeks before, the howitzers and trucks are prepared for the field; They are rushed through a maintenance pipeline that at all other times...
The Politics of Interpretation (University of Chicago Press; Chicago), edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, contains essays and responses to them by some of the leading literary theorists of our time–Booth, Bruns, Graff, Hirsch, Kristeva, Said, and others. One of the more lively controversies that emerge in the text has little to do with deconstructing,...
Be not deluded, just because the United States goes to war with Iraq, that our leaders will not also extend to the entire Middle East the jihad on which President Bush and his court of neoconservative gurus and Zionist Weltpolitikers have embarked us. Well before any public announcement of whether we would actually make war...
It is totally misleading to present history as if its course was inevitable. The past cannot be understood if the elements of chance and contingency are ignored. To assume that what happened was bound to happen—the teleological interpretation of history—takes away the options facing individuals, groups, and governments in the past. It is analytically suspect,...
We were driving past the Pavilion de Flore, which punctuates the southwestern extremity of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie, when my neighbor suddenly gripped my arm and exclaimed, “Mira! Estos techos! estas chimineas! Hombre! Estupendo!” (Look! Those roofs, those chimneys! Man alive! Stupendous!) Such was the reaction of the famous Spanish cartoonist, Antonio Mingote, to his...
“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.” —Psalm 8:4-5 Ellis Sandoz’s new book is of such importance to us in our intellectually disoriented day as...
“We don’t like it when someone from outside teaches us how to live.” Thus spake Soviet spokesman Gennady Gerasimov in reaction to President Reagan’s emphasis on human rights this summer in Moscow. The Soviet leaders were displeased by Reagan’s decision to meet with dissidents during his free time away from the summit meetings with General...
On November 4, 2008, voters decisively rejected the Republican Party, voting for Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 52.8 percent to 45.9. Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173, including every state in the Northeast and industrial Midwest; every state on the Pacific Coast; Florida, the state that ensured George W....
The recent attack on New York City’s World Trade Center has once again reinforced in Western minds that terrorism is a purely Middle Eastern phenomenon, and that terms like “Palestinian,” “Shi’ite,” and “Muslim fundamentalist” are virtual synonyms for “terrorist.” There is no room here to discuss the damage that such a view has had on...
Every once in a great while, an article appears in a mainstream publication that lets the eat out of the bag, by spelling out ideas that have long been dominant in public life but are usually seen only in vague or implicit form. One such appeared in the July/August 1996 edition of Foreign Affairs. Entitled...
Political correctness has it that immigration is a perennial phenomenon in Western countries. This is preposterous. Immigration as we know it today is an extremely recent phenomenon. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, they say. This is just plain ridiculous. A small group of people leaving their country to found their...
Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. —Romans 12:2 While Mother Teresa was still alive, few who knew of her doubted that she would eventually...
Folks keep asking me when I’m going to write about California. (They generally lick their chops when they ask it. They seem to think I’m going to trash the place. I wonder why?) Anyway, yeah, it’s true that I’ve been living in the Golden State for several months now, and I haven’t said much about...
Though visually dazzling, Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu" collapses into caricature and fails to give the audience a good scare.
When Frank Bronkowski, my father, was alive, he’d read and reread his Polish newspapers, the Gwiazda Polarna, the Nowy Dziennik. He’d speak no English on Sundays and drink a Polish beer. His pocket watch—brought from the old country—stands in its place of honor on the dining-room table. Next to it, Ma has fresh peonies in...
One of the best things in life for a writer who sets out to be an artist is to be appreciated by people whose opinions are generally respected and valued. That is the happy condition in which I find myself this evening, and I thank the directors of the Ingersoll Foundation and the Rockford Institute....
The 2024 Republican presidential race is wide open. After the disastrous mid-terms, a Trump resurgence is far from inevitable.
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...
As ululating headline after ululating headline blares forth Wall Street’s apocalypse; as Obamamaniacs promise race riots to break whitey’s collective spirit once and for all; as concepts like Peak Oil move from the fringes to the mainstream of media discourse; as America is forced to apprehend, in Fay Weldon’s droll aphorism, that “the fin has...
Walking out of Maxim Vengerov’s recent recital at Avery Fisher Hall, I thought of the intermission more as a remission. At a bar in Penn Station a few minutes later, where I heard some Junior Wells on the sound system, the playing (if not the music) was better than anything that the violinist had given....
Once the right allowed the left to frame politics as the avoidance of tragedy, they lost the game. We’d do well to reconsider what Christopher Lasch called the “limits and hope” of politics.
To American readers the name A.A. Gill may mean nothing, but in England the restaurant and television critic of the Sunday Times is a cultural force to be reckoned with. A witty autodidact, with plenty of disdain for the pieties of the moment, to easily deafened ears he is a Jeremiah of the petit-four and...
Former President Bill Clinton declared his strong support for the Ground Zero mosque in an interview broadcast on September 12. He also suggested a clever new spin to the promoters of the project. Much or even most of the controversy, he said, “could have been avoided, and perhaps still can be, if the people who want...