Selective pernicious amnesia is the endemic disease of Establishment politics. Its symptoms are evident whenever the Soviet Union does something awful—like delivering six sophisticated Su-24D bombers to Libya, as it did in March 1988, or excusing the sinking of an advanced Soviet attack submarine in the Norwegian Sea last April, a submarine that, the Soviet...
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The Big Bore of Arkansas
“‘Jour printer, by trade; do a little in patent medicines; theatre-actor—tragedy, you know; take a turn at mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance; teach singing—geography school for a change; sling a lecture, sometimes—oh, I do lots of things—most anything that comes in handy, so it ain’t work. What’s your lay?’” —The Duke, Huckleberry Finn...
CHRISTENDOM
. . . [T]here is a fundamental point of intersection between the theory of a just government and much of the underpinning of what we know as Western civilization. Just as there is a necessary non-rational element in the former, so is there a powerful, ordering rational element in Christianity. The start of the Gospel...
Remembering Donald Davidson
Lewis P. Simpson, in his memorable preface to The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, evoked Thomas Carlyle’s description of Robert Burns to hail Davidson’s own achievement. Burns, wrote Carlyle, was a “piece of right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;—rock, yet with wells of living...
Too Much is Never Enough
Researchers report significantly increased rates of suicide among U.S. military personnel, college students, and baby boomers. Until now, suicide was most prevalent among teenagers and elderly persons. Journalists have suggested a number of explanations for the phenomenon, among the more plausible of them the structural collapse of the American family in which troubled, lonely, and...
Regression and Renewal
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,...
A Real Place
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! —Sir Walter Scott This work reminds me, on an appropriately more modest scale, of John Lukacs’s book on Philadelphians. Both hearken back to a time when Americans were a semicivilized people who lived in...
From El Paso to Plymouth
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...
The Long March Through the Constitution
In the opinion of Marshall DeRosa, one of the contributors to this book, The transition from states’ rights to unitary nationalism, i.e., domestic imperialism, was the most significant development in American politics. This marks one of the worst fears of the framers coming to fruition, tyranny. That is a self-evidently correct judgment. It is also...
Great Nations Need Great Citizens
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...
Bibliotheca of the Bizarre
The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities From History by Edward Brooke-Hitching Chronicle Books 256 pp., $29.95 Books are the “emblem of civilization,” Edward Brooke-Hitching writes in a new book that explores the strange history of the medium. The earliest books were used to establish and uphold administrative, legal, and taxation...
Academic Afterword: On the Occasion of My Retirement From the Academy
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,”...
The Titanic 90’s
Titanic Produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau Directed by James Cameron Screenplay by James Cameron Released by Paramount and 20th Century Fox The umpteenth movie about the sinking of the great ship finally meets modern standards. James Cameron’s Academy Award-winning Titanic may be the “movie of the year,” but it is just as dishonest,...
Downsizing Detroit Motown’s Lament
Detroiters have a deeply ironic way of looking at their beloved city. The irony is evident in a once-popular T-shirt that showed a muscular tough gripping a ferocious dog around the neck while holding a loaded gun to the animal’s head. “Say Nice Things About Detroit,” the T-shirt read. The T-shirt is a commentary on...
Real Jews
Exploration of the relationship between Jews and America is far from complete, at least among Jewish conservatives, who do not rely on their religious traditions as explicitly as do some among the Christian right. There has been some speculation in Jewish circles that the reason Jews in America have prospered is because both Judaism and...
The Banality of Banal
I first thought I would title this review “Memoirs of the Imperial Jester.” The jester being one who, though of no importance himself, is always present at the imperial court, I thought I discerned certain parallels between him and the author of A Life in the Twentieth Century. After looking into its pages, however, I...
On Liberty and the Grand Idea
For a long time I thought I knew how to evade the discourse of the Grand Idea. It began when I was in the Yugoslav People’s Army. The war was barely over, but victory brought no greater liberty to those who had suffered the Nazi occupation, and the brainwashing in the barracks grew more and...
Are the Good Times Really Over?
In mid-September, the original campus of Rockford’s Barber-Colman Company was named an historic district and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a fitting end to one of Rockford’s best-known manufacturing sites. Founded in 1900, the Barber-Colman Company gradually built the 15-building plant between Rock and River Streets, by the very ford in...
Society Before Government: Calhoun’s Wisdom
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...
Taking Back the Culture
By the time you read this, “the most important election of our lifetime” will be headed for the history books. If the last six most important elections of our lifetime are any indication, however, we will once again have a chance to vote in the most important election of our lifetime in 2020. Or perhaps...
The Evil That Men Don’t Do: Joe McCarthy and the American Right
His is probably the most hated name in American history. Other villains—Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—today evoke merely the esoteric passions of the antiquarian or the interminable controversies of partisans. Only Joe McCarthy has given his name to an enduring term of political abuse, and in American politics today there...
Truth or Consequences
“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...
The Vocal Scene
photo of Rosa Ponselle as Reiza in Oberon Of course my account of “the vocal scene” is not by the late George Jellinek—that cultured gentleman of Hungarian background. He had an extensive, even encyclopedic knowledge of the history of singing. His presentations of The Vocal Scene were the best things of their kind I have...
Orbán: Building the Wall
“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...
Polemics & Exchanges: May 2024
Chronicles contributors and readers tussle over Japanese culture, slavery, and NATO!
The Most Patriotic Conservative
I first encountered the name Samuel T. Francis in 1984, when Joe Sobran thrust a nondescript-looking little book, published in typically amateurish format by the University Press of America, into my hands and asked my permission to review it. (I was, in those days, the literary editor for National Review.) Its title was Power and...
Clip Clop, Bang Bang
The manipulative sensationalism regarding any display of the Confederate battle flag continues unabated. The New York Times gets hot and bothered, or sexually aroused—or whatever it is that the New York Times becomes—whenever that banner appears over the capitol of South Carolina or on a vanity tag in Maryland, indeed anywhere. The shibboleths of liberalism...
Epicene Europa
“Roll up the map of Europe; it will not be wanted these ten years.” —William Pitt (1806) “Nothing,” goes the Johnsonian cliché, “concentrates a man’s mind more wonderfully than the prospect of being hanged.” This very natural reaction may explain why a whole raft of intellectuals, journalists, and even politicians, none of whom was previously...
Notes From the Front, Part II
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...
Yuppie Cons
In the 1950’s, American conservatives, subscribing to what Clinton Rossiter called the “thankless persuasion,” were a hard-shelled, pig-eyed lot who took no prisoners and asked no quarter. National Review, in a once-famous but now largely forgotten editorial in its premier issue, vowed that its mission was to stand athwart history and cry stop. Admittedly, this...
Beyond the “Other Victorians”
To call something “Victorian” is, in left-liberal parlance, to say that you don’t like it. The fact that hardly anything routinely called “Victorian” accurately characterizes the era of Queen Victoria’s long reign, from 1837 to 1901, is one of the great historiographical tragedies of the 20th century. Thus, when a large number of African bishops...
Biden Pins His Hopes on Abortion
Democrats are desperate to make the election a referendum on Dobbs. Trump is right to refuse to resist that.
Greater Than the French Revolution
On July 15, 1870, the French Empire mobilized its armed forces, and the following day, the North German Confederation—led by Prussia—followed suit. Once the Franco-Prussian War was declared, actual combat began with startling rapidity. The Prussians won a decisive victory at Sedan at the start of September, capturing French Emperor Napoleon III. Even so, the...
Aaron Wolf, Memory Eternal
Remembering the significant contributions of former Chronicles executive editor Aaron Wolf on the fifth anniversary of his passing.
A Southern Braveheart
Ride With the Devil Produced by Ted Hope, Robert F. Colesberry, and James Schamu Directed by Aug Lee Screenplay by James Schamus Released by Universal Pictures and Good Machine It can be argued that the War Between the States began not at Fort Sumter but along the Missouri-Kansas border in the mid-1850’s. The passage of...
Homing in on England
Michael Wood begins with a quotation from Blake: “To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.” This line betokens his aim, which is to zero in on one small English place and use its specific saga to tell the wider tale of all England from prehistory to present. The place is Kibworth, an outwardly unremarkable...
Cold War, Warm Friends
The legacies of every war include controversy regarding its origins, its prosecution, its conclusion, and its material and political results. In the case of World War II, John Lukacs argues that among its major legacies was the Cold War, whose cause was the rigid division of Europe agreed upon by Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin...
Millions for Tribute
That imperial anthem, the hymn of the U.S. Marine Corps, is today somehow an obscure exercise. The halls of Montezuma? The shores of Tripoli? Our gum-popping, Gucci-schlepping youth can no more respond to its referential difficulties than could the Ivy League-credentialed savants of the War Party. What’s more, the pseudopatriots would be shocked to know that...
Muslim Migrants and the Religious Left
Why are so many Western Christians either silent about, or actually complicit in, the Muslim hegira to the West? One would think Christians would be at the forefront of opposition. Some are, but most are not, and these latter include Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, mainline “Protestants,” and evangelicals in America. These churches have made four...
America’s Christian Heritage
The phrase “America’s Christian Heritage” might irritate any hearers who do not want to be classed as members of the tribe that first received its name in Antioch (Acts 11:26). But wait: we recognize that one does not have to be a member of the family to be remembered in a will, nor be of...
The American Proscenium
Representation Ms. Geraldine Ferraro, a Democratic party hack, a Catholic feminist (what a spiritual and spirited concoction, brewed according to the recipes of the Queens-Long Island bourbon culture!) whom the amalgamated USA womanists (the newest vocable) wished to see as the next vice president, said of late: “The only real threat to women in America...
The Romantic Revival
The first thing to say about the Romantic Revival is that the phrase itself is a bit ambiguous, though I haven’t meant to be misleading. Romanticism originally had an aspect of revival of the medieval, as in the Gothic revival and the revival of medieval romance. And the phrase could also denote the return to...
Suleymen the Murderer
When I first heard of the young man who had opened fire in a Salt Lake City shopping mall, killing (I think) six and wounding three, I immediately began to wonder to which group of pschopaths the kid belonged: spoiled suburban white boy or Muslim. When it took more than an hour to release the...
Slouching Toward Mar-a-Lago
The Post-Cold-War Consensus Collapses Like it or not, the president of the United States embodies America itself. The individual inhabiting the White House has become the preeminent symbol of who we are and what we represent as a nation and a people. In a fundamental sense, he is us. It was not always so. Millard...
The Empire At Europe’s End
In the German name for Austria, Osterreich, Reich denotes more than “empire” in the sense of territorial extension; there is also a certain spiritual content. In the Middle Ages, empire meant the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium, and after Christmas Day 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo XIII, the Sacer Imperator Romanus was...
It’s Hard Times, Cotton Mill Girls
Historians tend to make the same argument: The South lost the Civil War because its economy was agrarian rather than industrial, with too few munitions factories to supply Confederate troops with weapons and too few textile mills to clothe them. According to these same historians, the postbellum sharecropper system proved to be an economic disaster,...
Playing Market
Jack Kemp arrived in February 1989 at the dark halls of the Department or Housing and Urban Development (HUD). During the Energy Crisis, the lights had been dimmed to save electricity, but as secretary, Kemp ordered them turned up. With that action, he began a two-year spending spree which has transformed its colossal concrete headquarters...
It’s Hard Times, Cotton Mill Girls
Historians tend to make the same argument: The South lost the Civil War because its economy was agrarian rather than industrial, with too few munitions factories to supply Confederate troops with weapons and too few textile mills to clothe them. According to these same historians, the postbellum sharecropper system proved to be an economic disaster,...
New Criticism, Old Values
It was in 1942 that John Crowe Ransom coined the phrase “The New Criticism” by publishing a book under that title, a book about the most respected literary critics of the first half of the century, notably T.S. Eliot, LA. Richards, William Empson, Yvor Winters, and R.P. Blackmur. But actually, he was criticizing the critics...
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school . . . ,” Paul Simon mused in a popular song some years ago. Simon, of course, was in high school long before multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, Outcome-Based Education, bilingual education. Heather Has 17 Mommies, Holocaust Studies, and assorted therapeutic group gropes and mass...