“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...
“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.”
One of the forgotten casualties of the war in Ukraine, as in all wars, is the loss of high-cultural monuments and works of art.
Long-forgotten is the early struggle between the Huguenots and the Spaniards for colonization of Floridian territory, where the Timucuan Indians dwelt.