1959: I was eight years old. Had someone told me I would one day own and operate a bed-and-breakfast, homeschool my kids, and possess a laptop that allowed me to write instant letters to far-away friends or read newspapers from England, such predictions would have boggled my mind. “Homeschool,” “laptop,” and so on were words...
“What’s past is prologue.” —Shakespeare, The Tempest Situated between Austria and Rumania, Hungary has a rich history worthy of many books. And though this country of less than ten million people is the size of the state of Maine, her role on the world stage is only increasing. She has declared war on billionaire deconstructionist...
The world will little remember what Barack Obama said during his disappointing presidency, despite his messianic promise and his reputation as rhetor par excellence. His words were not memorable to begin with. (Try to recall a quotation, apart from his famous campaign slogan.) More significantly, his words were not intended to be remembered. They served...
“I don’t know where democracy will end, but it can’t end in a quiet old age.” —Klemens von Metternich Rowland Evans and Robert Novak were among the first political commentators to designate the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan a watershed date in American political history. From their perspective in 1981, “What was so quickly started...
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every hook has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless...
Certain moments in a good story possess a quality that is logically very strange indeed, and that renders them often haunting and unforgettable. Consider Dorothea’s choice of Ladislaw as her lover in Middlemarch: the logic of fiction would dictate that Dorothea should pair up with Lydgate, who is a heavyweight like her, and if after...
Cam Newton’s petulance after the Carolina Panthers lost to the Denver Broncos largely eclipsed the splendid season Newton had had before the Super Bowl. Since Donald Trump essentially clinched the GOP nomination after winning over 50% of the vote in seven consecutive primaries, a number of conservative pundits and Republican politicians have begun emulating Newton’s...
Having failed to establish much of a numerical presence in American society, the Episcopal Church, USA, succeeds in attracting attention by the continuing antics of a long parade of outrageous ecclesiastics. In 2003, attention focused on the ordination of openly homosexual Vicky Imogene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. While I am reluctant to add...
I read Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s highly coloured article on ChroniclesMagazine.org about the recently deceased Archduke Otto of Austria with a mixture of surprise and concern. Not a single one of his sources supported the entirely negative picture that he drew. Let’s see why. “Habsburg was an enthusiastic supporter of the Jihadist side in the Bosnian civil war,...
When I accepted President Reagan’s appointment to be chairman of the National Council on Educational Research, I did so because I welcomed the opportunity to learn firsthand how professional bureaucrats approached America’s many and increasingly serious educational problems. After some time spent at my appointed task, I realized that bureaucrats were not capable of solving...
America, in case you haven’t noticed, is lost in the throes of celebrating the writing of its Constitution, which is now two centuries old. The somewhat labored efforts to fix public attention on the historic document are largely the work of former Chief Justice Warren Burger and his own private bureaucracy in the Commission on...
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....
Just as a conquering army defaces the monuments of its defeated foes, America’s woke film industry has seized the opportunity in Rings of Power to have its way with the mythology of Tolkien's Men of the West.
On May 8, 1995, President Boris Yeltsin addressed an auditorium filled with gray-haired war veterans, their chests bedecked with rows of ribbons and medals, and told them of the cost of victory in the Great Patriotic War. Citing new archival research, Yeltsin revealed the “terrifying figure” of 26,549,000 Soviet citizens “lost” in the war against...
Last November, a delegation of citizens from the far West Texas border city of El Paso made the long journey to Plymouth, Massachusetts. The purpose of the El Pasoans’ visit was to challenge Plymouth’s long-held—and nearly universally accepted—claim that it was the site of the first Thanksgiving to be held on what is now United...
“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” —Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire Sometimes, enlightenment, like confusion, can come from an unexpected source. Take the comedian, George Carlin, for example. I think that his broadcasting of dirty words is a bit less than profound, as is his hostility toward most civilized conventions; some...
Chronicles contributors and readers tussle over Japanese culture, slavery, and NATO!
Fourteen centuries of Islam have fatally undermined Christianity in the land of its birth. The decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East has been accelerated in recent decades, and accompanied by the indifference of the post-Christian West to its impending demise. Once-thriving Christian communities are now tiny minorities, and in most countries of...
“October Revolution” is probably an apt description of Canada’s 1993 parliamentary elections, as the month marked the enthronement of a left-oriented political establishment and the ejection of the ruling Conservatives. The Liberal Party’s sweep to an absolute majority meant the relegation of the Tory Progressive Conservative Party to virtual extinction (it now holds only two...
The schedule is rather monotonous for a lecturer invited to the big cities where universities are usually located. First comes the airport, then the car with the polite, smiling young man as a guide, then hotel room and restaurant, podium, introduction, photo graphs, the lecture itself-then the whole thing in reverse order the next day....
The founding fathers of the Munich Security Conference, said John McCain, would be “be alarmed by the turning away from universal values and toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism.” McCain was followed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who called for a “post-West world order.” Russia has “immense potential” for that said Lavrov,...
All over Britain and Ireland, including the unpleasing town where I live, which is run by a left-wing junta, there are memorials to those who fought in the International Brigades on the Red Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Even though there are but a few British and Irish survivors of the battles...
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 battle lines are drawn. On one side, Pope John Paul II and the French National Federation of Catholic Family Relations, along with numerous religious groups in this country. On the other, the American media, including New York magazine, the New York Times, Gannett newspapers, and many, many more. The issue: Abortion? Nuclear weapons? Return...
Yesterday I was tapping away on the laptop when through the window I saw a young man walking up the drive toward the house. He was shirtless, wearing jeans and brogans—do they still call work boots by this name?—and I correctly assumed he was one of the crew repaving the driveway of the house across...
It will take more than an economic revival to make America great again. We’re going to need a moral revival, too.
Images of those traumatized by the election of Donald Trump are indelible. I mean specifically the sight of empaneled experts, red-eyed, choking, and stuttering as they said things like “CNN is now prepared to call the state of Wisconsin for Donald Trump.” Or of rainbow mobs of sign-wavers in urban centers declaring (absurdly and solipsistically)...
When mild-mannered Bernhard Goetz shot four black youths who attempted to rob him in a New York subway in 1984, news reporters inevitably called him the “subway vigilante.” But Goetz was not a vigilante; he was not a member of a vigilant group of concerned citizens patrolling the subways as keepers of the peace. On...
“No government power can he abused long. Mankind will not bear it.” —Samuel Johnson The stereotype of the British journalist—and stereotypes are usually true—has an arrogant Brit arriving in Washington, rewriting the Washington Post and the New York Times for his dispatches, and spending the rest of his time in fancy...
I want to talk to people who have been shaken out of themselves by art, who have heard a piece of Mozart’s Magic Flute reach out and grab them by the heart, who have seen the grave look on Flora’s face as she steps out of Botticelli’s Primavera the way the gods always do, lit...
“To be an American,” George Santayana said, “is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.” For Americans and non-Americans alike, the American people has seemed a recognizable and describable breed from the earliest years of the Republic down to the 21st century, despite America’s reputation as a nation hospitable to immigration...
The media attacks on Trump have become relentless. For some reason, Washington Post headlines show up in my Facebook feed, and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the news stories from the opinion pieces—they all merge into a seemingly endless anti-Trump torrent. One example: a news story on Trump’s economic policy team was headlined “Trump’s...
For over a decade, the Roman Catholic Church has been in deep crisis over the issue of sexual abuse by Her clergy. That some priests had molested or raped children was indisputable, but just how many had offended? The numbers are more than a simple matter of statistical curiosity. While everyone agrees that “one case...
I wanted to hate this sustained attack on the academy, which condemns everything to which I have dedicated my life, but I loved every word. This man is a truth-teller, therefore he is shrill, obnoxious, abusive, aggressive, offensive, and absolutely right. His indictment spells out the following academic felonies: “teachers who don’t teach, students who...
The catastrophic burst of the housing bubble in the fall of 2008 shook the foundations of the world economy and instilled a fear of a new depression. Morris Dickstein notes with irony that he completed his cultural history of the Great Depression just as the country was entering a steep recession with parallels to the...
Plundering the treasures of conquered lands has always been a fair game, from Neolithic herds and Sabine women to works of art: Byzantine statuary adorns St. Marco’s in Venice, and Elgin’s marbles are in London to stay. But moving a land itself across an international frontier is a novel concept, one which is being tried...
“Imaging . . . is properly the work of a poet; the [rest] he borrows horn the historian.” —John Dryden Here is an unAmerican story. A young man writes a successful novel. Thousands of Americans, in the oddest places, esteem it highly. So do the most reputable publishers in New York. When he attempts the...
Trump deserves credit, not condemnation, for his legally sound and fundamentally just understanding of the 14th Amendment.
Siena is almost entirely a city of the later Middle Ages. The days of glory—artistic as well as political—were the 13th and 14th centuries, and by the time the city was absorbed by the Medici empire in 1552, it was already a place of memories, whose people were ridiculed by the Florentines (in Dante’s phrase)...
A questionnaire about future needs recently sent to a department of literature provoked at least one interesting reply: “We do not need a new post in Critical Theory. Theory is Old Hat.” An old hat, they say, is better than a bare head, and there can be no quarrel with the view that critical theory...
Paleoconservatism is the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture—an identity that is both collective and personal. This identity is missing from the psychological and emotional makeup of leftists of every stripe—including “neoconservatives”—and is now disavowed by mainline conservatives of the Republican...
A nation’s wealth and status is like starlight—what you see is not what is, but what was. Just as the light we see from a distant star started its journey thousands of years ago, so is the nation’s current success due principally to past actions. Great nations have great momentum; past investments in education and...
Thanksgiving is the time of year when Americans are supposed to take stock and give thanks. The mere fact that we can take stock should make us grateful to be alive and conscious. This Thanksgiving, I am particularly thankful that I don’t have to go anywhere by plane. Over the past three or four decades,...
In an essential article published on June 16, one of the key architects of the Iraq war, former ambassador John Bolton, argued that “US focus must be on Iran as Iraq falls apart.” He is unapologetic about the war itself, saying that “inevitably, analysts are rearguing George W. Bush’s decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Barack...
Every night, in prime time, a changeling can enter your living room, an inhuman creature secretly usurping a human’s place. It’s an unnatural presence, an electronic phantom with vast and secret motivations; but its presence is so enjoyable and comforting, as well as so familiar (it hastens to assure you), that you really don’t mind...
I remember a time when the terms “community” and “virtue” had almost disappeared from philosophical discourse. Working on a doctorate in philosophy at Washington University in the mid-60’s, I took a seminar in ethics from Prof. Herbert Spiegelberg, who had written the definitive history of phenomenology. One day, he observed that philosophers no longer even spoke...