The necessity of choosing is a fact of life. At even a tender age, one must choose between a doll or a tea set, a wagon or a tricycle, Captain Crunch or Frosted Flakes. As one becomes older, the choices become more difficult and more significant. When one is wise enough–lucky enough–to choose well, things remain...
This new consideration of a well-worn subject is altogether justified for two salient reasons. The first is that Red Star Over Hollywood contains new material and judgment fortified by new research and information; the second, that the topic has been distorted not only by failures of interpretation but by continuing exploitation, even today. The Radoshes...
For decades, Edward C. Banfield taught within the Ivy League environment despite being a right-winger who favored empirical investigation over theories and feelings.
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...
Having turned 60 last month I should start taking stock of my life, making the reasonable assumption that the best is behind me (infantile baby-boomer assertion that “sixty is the new forty” notwithstanding). Yes, I am doing that, but such musings are not to be shared. A byproduct, which may be of some interest to...
At the end of the recent remake of Planet of the Apes—turn the page now if you still plan to see it—the hero escapes from said planet and its monstrous chimp-tyrant, General Thade. Returning to Earth at night, his spacecraft crashes in, of all places, the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Mall, and he solemnly...
Now that communism is dead, a new specter is haunting much of Europe—the specter of nationalism. In several countries, for the first time since World War II, what may be conveniently termed nationalist, right-wing, populist parties are on the verge of coming to power, or at least of gaining respectable numbers of seats in government....
The true nature of the New Deal was revealed in one of those brilliant ironies that flash lightning-like in a midnight storm. It happened September 13, 1933, the Nativity of a new secular holiday: NRA Day. An interminable parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue celebrated the National Recovery Administration, which was to set prices, fix...
As I write I have in front of me a number of statements, articles, and conference projects—and more are coming to my attention almost daily—indicating what amounts to an invasion of Eastern and Central Europe by Western zealots, do-gooders, investors, gurus, and sharks. They emanate from American and West European offices, banks, institutes, universities, and...
For Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister save only founding father David Ben-Gurion, it has been a week of triumph. Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal as Bibi had demanded. Thursday, after Iran launched 20 missiles at the Golan Heights, Bibi answered with a 70-missile attack...
Little does history remember the death of Vice President Garret Augustus Hobart at the tender age of 55, barely a month before the beginning of the present century. Yet we have cause to lament that, in the words of the Psalmist, this humble personage was not granted a span of 70, or even 80, years....
For many weeks the press in Britain have been obsessed with the Jimmy Savile sex scandal, and it has many months to run. Savile, who died in 2011, aged 84, was a superstar entertainer for the BBC, and his programs attracted millions of viewers. The BBC needed Savile and his huge audiences to justify the...
Voices are heard from the British Islands that are highly critical of Mr. Reagan’s decision to do something about that other little island–Grenada. Let us take a brief peek at what for the last two centuries has been called in history books the perfidyof Albion. Once it was a world calamity, but today it seems more...
Walter Scott, in 1820, wrote that Fielding is “father of the English Novel.” Yet James Russell Lowell, in 1881, remarked to an English audience that “We really know almost as little of Fielding’s life as of Shakespeare’s.” Lives of Fielding, or important essays about him, have been written by distinguished men of letters—Arthur Murphy, Walter...
Now that Biden is out of the 2024 presidential race, is Congress just going to pretend this is a game show and ignore the impeachment investigation they voted to advance?
In one of Douglas Adams’ very silly books, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the egocentric two-headed president of the universe, is condemned to undergo the ordeal of the Total Perspective Vortex. It is an excruciating form of torture that exposes the criminal to a sense of the infinite size of the universe and his own small place in...
There is a distressing history of foreign insurgent groups manipulating U.S. political figures, policymakers, and opinion leaders into supporting their causes. Frequently, that support goes far beyond rhetorical endorsements. On several occasions during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, foreign lobbying efforts have led to U.S. military and financial aid being given to highly...
Early in my first Russian-language course, our professor noted that the word for “Sunday” is the same as the word for “resurrection.” Somebody asked her how that word had managed to survive under 70 years of totalitarian atheism. She replied that Russian is so permeated with Christian images that it would be impossible to remove...
Remember Kate Millett? She made the cover of Time in 1970 after her dissection of literary machismo, Sexual Politics, became a blockbuster best-seller and won her the title of leading feminist spokesperson. It didn’t last. Although she was married, she soon announced that she was a lesbian, which split the women’s movement and destroyed her...
I was born in 1964, in a country that most people, inside America and out, regarded as the greatest on the planet. Indeed, many felt that America in the early 1960s was the greatest country there had ever been. There was little reason at the time to question this consensus. Americans enjoyed a standard of living...
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Appomattox. In recent times, academics studying the Civil War have reached a striking degree of consensus about how that war should be understood, and its practical implications today. Sadly, that consensus has one enormous omission. Overwhelmingly, scholars agree that the war was about the defense and preservation of...
Early in Owen Wister’s 1905 novel Lady Baltimore, the narrator, recently arrived in Charleston from Philadelphia, remarks upon the stillness of the city, its “silent verandas” and cloistered gardens behind their wrought iron gates—“this little city of oblivion . . . with its lavender and pressed shut memories . . . ” For Wister the...
Ron DeSantis succeeded, not only in vanquishing Gavin Newsome in debate, but more importantly in illustrating the wide gulf between the elite ruling class and ordinary Americans.
He wrote one of the most distinctive and original prose styles of his time, paralleling the techniques of his Yankee contemporary, Henry James, anticipating those of Pound and Eliot. But he used that style to write Greek grammars and commentaries on obscure Greek and Latin poets and page after page of “brief mentions,” mini-reviews, of...
No matter how many curses should be heaped on the head of Thurgood Marshall, recently retired from some 24 years of slicing and twisting the raw meat of the Constitution into whatever ideological pastry suited his appetite of the moment, even his shrillest foes have to acknowledge Mr. Marshall’s eminence in the legal and judicial...
Chronicles has asked me “to participate in a roundtable on the contributions and legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.” His contributions were of enormous importance. His legacy, perhaps less so. Here was a solitary man whose mind was illuminated by a sense of compelling duty: to write a truth, to cut a single clearing in a monstrous...
After an uninterrupted spell of a winter month or two here in Venice—all footsteps in the evening mist, and quiet conversation about the best way to cook pheasant, and a Neapolitan card game called “seven and a half—what one notices on arriving in London is the way women move. First of all, it’s the speed....
Most Americans appear to have spent their second September 11 anniversary paying tribute to the American ideals of open borders and acceptance of all forms of diversity—religious, ethnic, sexual, moral, and intellectual. I spent it in Novi Sad, attending a conference on Islam and the West. The one-day conference, part of the Rockford Institute convivium...
“Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?” —Juvenal On November 29, 1984, an FBI agent in Massachusetts took extensive notes from a long conversation with an alcoholic woman about the alleged Soviet spy activities of her former husband, John Walker. Barbara Walker initiated the meeting with a phone call on November 17. Her story was filed and...
In the Bedroom Produced by Good Machine and GreeneStreet Films Inc. Directed by Todd Field Screenplay by Robert Festinger from a story by Andre Dubus Released by Good Machine and Miramax Films Blackhawk Down Produced by Columbia Pictures Corporation and Jerry Bruckheimer Films Directed by Ridley Scott Screenplay by Ken Nolan and Mark Bowden Released...
Ben Lummis was not in a mood to write this morning. He wanted to be outdoors, and, because he was an outdoor writer, being outdoors was as legitimate a part of his job as writing about having been outdoors was after he’d been there. His work had two stages, outdoor and indoor, and in the...
The names are legendary; the tales of heroism, a part of our heritage as Texans and Americans. Houston, Crockett, Bowie, Travis: All, save William Barret Travis, were nationally known figures before they came to Texas, which was then considered Mexican territory. Sam Houston had been governor of Tennessee, a protégé of Andrew Jackson, a war...
When the new guru of the Grand Old Party waddled up to the Speaker’s chair and took his oath, the clock began ticking. The GOP had 100 days to fulfill a good measure of its “Contract with America.” Since House Speaker Gingrich has been planning his takeover of Congress for more than two decades, just...
Sixty years ago an incident lodged in my memory forever as it seems, as I walked with the beautiful redheaded young lady who paused to ask me a question. There above an old outbuilding—I hesitate to call it a barn—there was a weathervane appearing as the silhouette of a rooster. But this image was perforated...
The return of GOP’s minority-party mindset is very likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy come November.
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze” Some recent Australian cultural trends—massive Islamic immigration, for instance—are ...
President Barack Obama’s tirade on June 14 was filled with angry passion. His rhetoric was not directed against the perpetrator of the Orlando attack and his ilk, however, but against the (unnamed) GOP nominee and others who do not subscribe to Obama’s fundamental views on the nature of Islam and his “strategy” of confronting the...
David Brock, scourge of Anita Hill and Bill Clinton, the young man who gave new meaning and currency to the phrase “Arkansas state trooper,” has made a second career of repenting of his years in the conservative movement. He has now retold the story of his disaffection from the movement in Blinded by the Right:...
“Hail, happy Britain! Highly favored isle, And Heaven’s peculiar care!”—William Somerville British conservative circles are awash with books at the moment. Apart from the usual think-tank reports and surveys, we have seen recently John Major’s and Norman Lamont’s memoirs, John Redwood’s Death of Britain, and the latest miscellany from Daily Telegraph...
On meeting with the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker last month, Donald Trump tweeted: “Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be Free Market and Fair Trade.” Did Larry Kudlow somehow get access to Trump’s phone? We know not. But, on hearing this, Steve Forbes, Stephen Moore and Arthur...
The euphoria that accompanied the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, should still be fresh in our minds. We remember the scenes of people dancing on the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, total strangers embracing each other, sharing bottles of champagne. We remember the party atmosphere that culminated in reunification...
Short reviews of Interventions 2020, by Michel Houellebecq, and The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great Power Rivalry Today, by Hal Brands.
The Ingersoll Prizes On December 8, 1983, in Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, The Ingersoll Prizes were awarded for the first time. Mr. Jorge Luis Borges was the recipient of the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, and Mr. James Burnham received the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters. The Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, theologian and...
[This review first appeared in the October 1990 issue of Chronicles.] Walter Scott, in 1820, wrote that Fielding is “father of the English Novel.” Yet James Russell Lowell, in 1881, remarked to an English audience that “We really know almost as little of Fielding’s life as of Shakespeare’s.” Lives of Fielding, or important essays about...
After several weeks of fulminating about John Kerry’s war record and the medals he presumably awarded himself, at least some veterans of the Stupid Party eventually got down to the real point about the man who wants to replace ...
When Lorena Bobbitt startled her hubby one evening with a knife through his privates—vigorously severing an intimate part of their relationship—a lot of women apparently admired the, uh, statement Lorena made that night. I own the conversation radio station for Lancaster & York counties in Pennsylvania, and the other morning Lorena Bobbitt talk poured from...
Often in that period in her life, when she least expected it, she would feel the change creeping over her. It would start in the middle of an intense conversation with her younger son or with her daughter, behind whose newly finished face she saw her past and intimations of her future flickering silently, waiting...
The liberal print media, like all things liberal, are never more themselves than when searching out, discovering, and deploring violence in America—gun violence, police violence, violence against women, violence against children, violence against racial and ethnic minorities, violence against immigrants, violence against Muslims, violence against homosexuals and “transgender people,” violence against foreign countries and cultures,...
If Donald Trump’s legion of enemies had the same grace they decry him for lacking, they would have had to admit that his re-election campaign was a bravura performance. Facing the combined opposition of the media, academy, entertainment industry, permanent bureaucracy, tech monopolists, and big money generally, Donald Trump crisscrossed the country in the final few...
From the August 2001 issue of Chronicles. 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...